Toward more sustainable supply management: Practices, determinants, and enablers for ensuring sustainability across multiple supply chain tiers

Abstract

In today’s supply chains, it is increasingly critical for firms to ensure sustainability across multiple supply chain tiers and know the origins of their products and raw materials. This dissertation investigates how firms can ensure and drive sustainability in the context of multi-tier supply chains. By examining the practices, determinants, and enablers for ensuring sustainability across multiple supply chain tiers, the objective is to provide a holistic view on how the multi-tier supply chain perspective is considered in firms’ sustainable supply management efforts. This dissertation is a qualitative multiple-case study that considers a variety of perspectives across multiple supply chain tiers. The primary data consists of semi-structured interviews that were conducted at 25 firms, including Finnish focal firms, and their first-tier and lower-tier suppliers located in Europe.

This dissertation reveals several mechanisms and practices used by firms to ensure sustainability and highlights the importance of multi-tier collaboration, learning, and innovation. The results underline the rareness of direct lower-tier supplier management and show that firms tend to delegate the task to their direct suppliers. Also, the findings show that it is crucial to consider power dynamics and traceability capabilities when it comes to driving and ensuring supply chain sustainability. Importantly, it emphasises the need for a multi-tier perspective in sustainable supply management. By providing empirical evidence from multiple industries, this dissertation contributes to the relational view and resource dependence theory as well as to several literature streams, including multi-tier sustainable supply chain management (MT-SSCM). It offers novel insights and theoretical frameworks that can inform future research while aiding firms in their pursuit of driving and ensuring sustainability across multiple tiers of the supply chain.