Why Research in Sustainable Supply Chain Management Should Have no Future

• Published date: 01 January 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jscm.12037
• Author: Mark Pagell,Anton Shevchenko
• Date: 01 January 2014

WHY RESEARCH IN SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN

MANAGEMENT SHOULD HAVE NO FUTURE

MARK PAGELL

University College

ANTON SHEVCHENKO

York University

In the last two decades, the topic of sustainability has moved from the

fringes of supply chain management research to the mainstream and is

now an area of significant research activity. In this paper, we argue that

while this increase in acceptance and activity is welcome and has lead to a

greater understanding of sustainability, our present knowledge is not suf-

ficient to create truly sustainable supply chains. We build on this insight

to identify five main issues that future research needs to address. We

argue that when it comes to the theory of sustainable supply chain man-

agement, previous research has focused on the synergistic and familiar

while overlooking trade-offs and radical innovation. These theoretical

issues are compounded by measures that do not truly capture a supply

chain’s impacts and methods that are better at looking backwards than

forwards. The paper concludes by proposing a series of recommendations

that address these issues to help in the development of truly sustainable

supply chains.

Keywords: sustainability; supply chain management; sustainable supply chain man-

agement

INTRODUCTION

In the mid-1990s, Steve Melnyk gave one of us

(Mark Pagell) a great opportunity to be the research

assistant on an early project that examined environ-

mental issues in an operational/supply chain context.

Mark mostly wasted that opportunity because he paid

too much attention to naysayers who told him he

would hurt his career by working on such a “fringe”

topic.

In the intervening two decades, sustainable supply

chain management (SSCM) has moved from being a

fringe topic that many of us were actively discouraged

from studying, to the mainstream. So mainstream that

many of the same people who discouraged such

research 20 years ago are conducting it today.

Given the importance of addressing a host of envi-

ronmental and social issues, this progress from fringe

to mainstream is welcome. But, this paper’s main

argument is that while such progress increases the

odds of supply chains becoming more sustainable, the

question of how to create truly sustainable supply

chains remains unanswered. This question will not be

answered until researchers no longer treat SSCM as a

separate stream of SCM.

Seuring and M€

uller (2008, p. 1700) define SSCM as:

the management of material, information and capi-

tal flows as well as cooperation among companies

along the supply chain while taking goals from all

three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e.,

economic, environmental and social, into account

which are derived from customer and stakeholder

requirements.

And Pagell and Wu (2009, p. 38) define a truly sus-

tainable supply chain as:

Acknowledgment: We wish to thank the editors at JSCM for

inviting us to share our thoughts and the reviewers for making

these thoughts much more coherent. We also need to thank

Tom Gattiker, Mellie Pullman, and Zhaohui Wu for providing

invaluable and insightful feedback on an early draft of the man-

uscript. Finally, an early version of this manuscript was pre-

sented as the keynote address at the 2013 IPSERA conference in

Nantes, France.

Volume 50, Number 144