Culture and green supply chain management (GSCM): A systematic literature review and a proposal of a model

Abstract

Purpose

This paper seeks to explore, summarize, and interpret the existing literature linking green supply chain management (GSCM) to culture. To achieve this goal, three main questions are answered: (1) How culture has been linked to GSCM in prior works? (2) What are the general problems exposed? (3) What gaps to detect?

Design/methodology/approach

A systematic literature review related to culture–GSCM was conducted. The review combines descriptive and content analysis of 46 academic peer-reviewed English papers from 30 international journals.

Findings

Around 90 percent of the articles are empirical papers, only 10 percent are conceptual papers. These papers systematically focused on two issues: the largest number deal with the organizational culture–environmental practices, then national culture–environmental practices. The GSCM–culture relationship underlines contrast findings stemmed from various factors, levels of analysis, different sample, research design, contexts, and so on. Among the results, a conceptual model is developed, allowing suggestions for future research.

Research limitations/implications

This review is limited by the environmental practices of SCM raised in the literature, excluding corporate responsibility or ethics researches. This study may not be exhaustive and expose all papers in the field, but it does definitively assess a wider number of papers available and to which access is provided. Future researchers empirically test the conceptual model proposed toward more clarifications.

Practical implications

This paper provides managers with an extra element to take into consideration while accustoming with GSCM, which is better understanding the role and the sensitivity of cultural values in order to harmonize with the changes.

Originality/value

This paper had extended the prior reviews to add recent and new papers. It does not only update the understanding related to culture–GSCM but goes beyond that to propose a multidisciplinary model theorizing the existing links and calling for ultimate investigations for the detected gaps.

Citation

Elbaz, J. and Iddik, S. (2020), "Culture and green supply chain management (GSCM): A systematic literature review and a proposal of a model", Management of Environmental Quality, Vol. 31 No. 2, pp. 483-504. https://doi.org/10.1108/MEQ-09-2019-0197