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While the three interconnected aspects of the triple bottom line -environmental, social and economic sustainability- are well-established, these aspects have insufficiently been addressed together in the supply chain management literature. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether environmental and social performance mediates the relationship between environmental management practices and operational performance and whether operational performance mediates the relationship between environmental and social performance and financial performance.

Drawing on a data set of 208 firms operating in a wide range of manufacturing industries, the authors test the hypotheses using structural equation modeling. The research context for the study is Turkey, an important emerging market and one of the nexuses of European and Asian supply chains.

The findings indicate that all three aspects of sustainability have mutually supportive relationships as demonstrated by positive mediating mechanisms between environmental management practices and operational performance and between environmental and social performance and financial performance. The mediation results correspond with the resource-based view. They indicate that building up capabilities and resources in the form of environmental management practices supports three areas of the triple bottom line and boosts firms’ financial performance.

Research on sustainability is well-established, yet supply chain management research has, thus, far paid insufficient attention to all three aspects. This paper, thus, sets itself apart by explicitly considering all three aspects of sustainability and contributes to understanding how they relate to one another.

The purpose of this paper is to use institutional theory to develop the constructs of institutional pressures for social compliance and argue for a positive relationship between institutional pressures and Supplier Social Compliance Management System (SSCMS). Moreover, the authors theorize that the impact of institutional pressures on SSCMS is moderated by the supplier’s organizational culture. This is done in a particularly salient context, which is apparel manufacturing in a developing country.

The hypothesized model is tested using data of 164 suppliers from the apparel manufacturing sector. PLS-based structural equation modeling is used to test the direct and multi-group moderation hypotheses.

Empirical examination provides evidence that institutional pressures have a positive impact on supplier social compliance and the types of organizational culture have varied moderation effects.

This research is based on cross-sectional data from one industry. Future research should collect data from diverse sectors in different countries.

The findings suggest that consistent pressures from various stakeholders can increase supplier social compliance. In addition, the partial evidence for moderation effect of organizational culture indicates that supplier’s internal value system’s alignment with social compliance pressures plays an important role in determining how supplier acts on social compliance initiatives.

The issue of suppliers’ adoption of social compliance management systems has become prominent as a consequence of the shifting of manufacturing to developing countries. However, comprehensive frameworks explaining antecedents of adoption of SSCMS using large-scale empirical data are limited. In addition, findings on the relationship between supplier social sustainability practices and their antecedents are inconsistent.

This study seeks to explore the roles of organizational support and environmental manager commitment on organizational environmental management practices.

A survey of environmental managers was conducted to examine the role of organizational support and individual environmental commitment on key informant perceptions of environmental organizational practices including participation in extra‐organizational voluntary environmental programs, adoption of a company‐specific environmental management system (EMS), and involvement in ISO 14000 certification.

Study findings demonstrate that high perceptions of organizational support for the environment affect the likelihood of an organization's implementation of environmental practices. Similarly, study findings indicate that higher levels of environmental commitment of the individual responsible for environmental management practices affects the likelihood of an organization's implementation of environmental practices. Lastly, the statistical results provide evidence that high organizational support and high personal commitment by an environmental champion interact to enhance the implementation of environmental practices.

This study represents the first development and empirical testing of a model of how organizational support for environmental practices and environmental managers' commitment to such endeavors affect the adoption of environmental practices by organizations. Additionally, the research illustrates how theoretical perspectives from the organizational behavior literature can be fruitfully adopted to explain behavior in the field of supply chain management.

This paper examines the role played by environmental issues during the new product design process. These issues are studied through an exploratory research project based on case studies of ten companies. The firms studied can be categorized into one of five major groups: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. These groups strongly parallel the model of new product acceptance initially developed in the computer industry, as presented by Moore (1991). Of interest is the gap that exists between the early adopters and early majority users. This gap forms a chasm. Those factors that account for acceptance of environmentally responsible manufacturing in the innovators and early adopters are significantly different from those factors observed in the early majority, late majority, and laggards. This paper examines these and other differences, and the impact of these differences on the acceptance and use of environmental concerns within the new product design process.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sales revenue of two retail companies (Marks & Spencer and Tesco) in the UK to understand how CSR activities can influence retail sales growth. Prior studies have used different theoretical and methodological approaches to report the relationships between CSR and financial performance generally as positive, negative, mixed or neutral, and these are yet to be conclusive.

Clarifying the existing inconclusive results, the authors deduced donations, community work and environmental responsibility CSR activities from the literature and mapped them out onto sales revenue to formulate conceptual propositions. The authors extracted the corresponding data from the companies’ websites and financial reports, focusing on their 2006-2014 CSR and sales activities, and statistically analysed the longitudinal data with Pearson correlation coefficient.

The findings revealed positive correlations between donations and sales revenue for the two companies, which suggest that retailers’ philanthropic activities can boost sales levels overtime. Whereas the findings on the community work and the environmental-friendly activities relate either positively or negatively to sales revenue for the companies.

There is an indication for retail managers to pursue philanthropic activities to effect sales growth. Retailers exhibiting features of Marks & Spencer can commit to community investment to increase revenue over time, whereas those showing features of Tesco can pledge environmental-friendly strategies to influence a stronger correlation between carbon emissions and sales revenue levels.

The outcomes support the extant findings that donations can improve retail sales performance, while community work and the environmental-friendly activities do not necessarily improve sales growth in the retail sector but suggest that retailers can exploit more of the ones that benefit their sales revenue levels. Theoretically, the study supports the stakeholder theory’s influence on firms’ obligation to charitable cause, community investment and environmental-friendly responsibility as CSR activities that make retailers morally responsible to their customers and society in general, whereas the sustainable development model was instrumental in retailers’ CSR activities relating to environmental protection.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence of uncertainty on workplace accidents at the plant level. Furthermore, this study explores such relation in complex settings (i.e. manufacturing networks) and assesses whether or not information sharing in such environments can reduce the potentially negative impact of uncertainty on accidents.

To assess the relationships between uncertainty, accidents and information sharing the authors utilise cross-country survey data collected through the sixth iteration of the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey. The authors conceptualise workplace accidents through production time lost due to accidents. Furthermore, the authors conduct multiple regression analyses to test the hypotheses.

Results suggest that procurement, production, and demand uncertainties do indeed lead to an increase in workplace accidents at the plant level. Furthermore, the negative impact of uncertainty can be significantly reduced through information sharing.

This study represents a comprehensive attempt to simultaneously assess the impact of uncertainty on workplace accidents at the plant level and the possible moderating impact of information sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of complexity on the triple bottom line by applying information-processing theory. Specifically, the paper assesses the impact of internal manufacturing complexity on environmental, social, and financial performance. Furthermore, the paper assesses the moderating role of connectivity and shared schema in reducing the potential negative impact of complexity on performance.

Multi-country survey data collected through the Global Manufacturing Research Group were utilized to test the hypotheses. The authors used structural equation modeling to test the measurement and initial structural model. Furthermore, to test the proposed moderating hypotheses, the authors applied the latent moderated structural equations approach.

The results indicate that while complexity has a negative impact on environmental and social performance, it does not significantly affect financial performance. Furthermore, this negative impact can be reduced, to some extent, through connectivity; however, shared schema does not significantly impact on the complexity-performance relationship.

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the impact of complexity on sustainability. Furthermore, it provides managerial applications as it proposes specific tools to deal with the potential negative influences of complexity.

Manufacturing companies today are part of a dynamic, globalized system of production and consumption. Globally dividing labor is now the predominant way of organizing business, but it is clear that the resource demands of linear supply chains have created vulnerability and harm in the system and beyond. The authors draw inspiration from ecology to explore the role of manufacturers in the transition from linear to circular supply chains. Borrowing the adaptive cycle model, originally developed to describe dynamic ecological systems, they employ case examples to illustrate the ways that supply chain management is being reimagined in the shift to a circular economy. This conceptualization uses the adaptive cycle to consider the transition from linear to circular supply chains as part of broader systems change, and the opportunities for manufacturers to play a transformative role in shaping a sustainable future.

Industry 4.0 not only impacts the manufacturing industry but also supply chain practices. Drawing on the resource-based view (RBV), the purpose of this paper is to examine how Industry 4.0 affects supply chain integration (SCI) and supply chain performance (SCP).

The data were collected from 212 respondents in manufacturing companies. The partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the hypotheses of this study.

The findings reveal that Industry 4.0 has a positive impact on SCI and SCP, and SCI has a positive impact on SCP. In addition, a partial mediating role of SCI has been found between Industry 4.0 and SCP.

This study reveals the role of Industry 4.0 on supply chain practices and draws attention to SCI in the linkage between Industry 4.0 and SCP. The findings emphasise the need for Industry 4.0 and SCI to enhance SCP.

There is limited research on the impacts of Industry 4.0 on SCI and SCP. This research finds empirical evidence for these impacts and enhances knowledge of Industry 4.0 by using a sample from an emerging country.