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This study aims to identify various enablers and the inter-relationships among them in adopting social sustainability measures in the supply chain. Social sustainability in the supply chain has received growing attention in the recent years, due to growing awareness on equity, health and safety, education, child and bonded labor and ethical practices in corporates.

Various enablers and their contextual relationships were identified. The enablers were classified based on dependence and driving power (DP) with the help of MICMAC analysis. In addition to this, a structural model of the enablers to the social sustainability problem has been put forward using the interpretive structural modeling technique.

In this study, 14 relevant enablers were identified from literature review and subsequent discussions with experts from academia and the industry. Competitive pressure leads at the bottom of the digraph with high DP, followed by customers ' requirements, financial liquidity and social concern. Social sustainability awareness was found to be at the last level with less DP.

Enablers were developed based on literature survey and expert opinions. Hence, the model is not statistically validated. This model also does not quantify the adverse effect of each of the variables on social sustainability practices in the supply chain.

The development of a hierarchy not only helps the supply chain managers to understand the enablers better, based on their importance, but also helps in decision making in the supply chain, which in turn enables the corporations to be competitive.

Findings of this article will help the corporations to be more socially sustainable by understanding the various enablers and their contextual relationships in the supply chain.

The structured social sustainability model helps supply chain managers and experts to understand interdependence of the enablers. This also helps in identifying different enablers with different degree of importance, which will be very much useful in adopting social sustainability measures in the supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate why developing country suppliers are adopting socially sustainable practices and how the implementation process is both impeded and enabled.

A multi-case study approach is adopted based on four ready made garment (RMG) industry suppliers in Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi buying houses of two large UK retailers. The primary mode of data collection is exploratory face-to-face interviews with 14 senior representatives. Findings are later interpreted using the transaction cost economics (TCE) theory lens.

One factor motivating implementation is labour retention – a skilled labour shortage means employees will migrate to other factories if suppliers do not improve certain social standards. Barriers to implementation include a misalignment between the requirements of western codes of conduct and the cultural and socio-economic context in Bangladesh. Enablers include a shift from auditing and monitoring to more open dialogue and trust between buyers and suppliers. The paper also reveals evidence of mock compliance, e.g. suppliers keeping two sets of timesheets, and of the complexities of social sustainability. For example, while some initiatives are unanimously positive, removing child labour from RMG industry suppliers has simply diverted it to other, less regulated and more hazardous industries such as construction.

An early, exploratory contribution is provided. The work could be extended, e.g. to other stakeholders such as third-party auditors and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs).

Being aware of the motivations, barriers and enablers will help multi-national corporations (MNCs) promote good practice and anticipate the challenges they are likely to face in improving the social sustainability of their supply chains. Use of TCE leads to suggesting MNCs need to move beyond immediate suppliers and incorporate tier-two suppliers in implementation efforts.

Social sustainability improvements should benefit vulnerable workers, help suppliers develop longer term relationships with MNCs, and contribute to economic growth.

Most prior studies have been in the context of developed countries and focused on the perspective of the buying firm only.

In the modern digital age technologies like Industry 4.0 has revolutionized the manufacturing sector. There are many economic and technological advantages of digitalization. Along with economic benefits, manufacturing enterprises especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs) need to take advantage of digitalization in strengthening their social performance. Observing the importance of social performance of Indian SMEs and availability of limited research in this direction, the current study has done a holistic analysis of social performance enablers.

A systematic literature review with a series of personal interviews of experts has been conducted to identify the enablers of social performance and supportive digital technologies. A fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) approach has been applied to find the degree of influence and interrelation between enablers. Sensitivity analysis is also performed to validate the results obtained.

Authors observed that policies of corporate and social responsibility, support by top management, awareness of social performance issues, and ethical practices and collaboration amongst supply chain members are leading causing enablers of social performance. Preparedness for the uncertainty of pandemics, improved work conditions and ergonomics, green practices, improvement in global business and improved living standards of employees and their families are leading the effect group of enablers. Further authors also observed that social media, information and communication technologies (ICT), websites, smart surveillance, e-mails and cloud computing are few supportive digital technologies of social performance issues.

SMEs all over the globe are passing through a transition due to digitalization and influence of pandemics. The finding of current study highlights the importance of strategic management of social performance enablers. Since the research is very limited in the social performance area, especially in Indian SMEs, this study makes a notable contribution to the literature too.

Novelty of this study is that social performance enablers of Indian SMEs in the digital era have been analysed holistically. The content of this research is the original work of the authors and has not been submitted for any other publication.

This study aims to understand how firms in developing economies acquire knowledge about social sustainability by leveraging the social capital embedded in firms' social network, through optimally governing relationships with network members. The study proposes that relational and contractual governance mechanisms interact with various structural facets of the network, resulting in varying degrees of social sustainability related knowledge acquisition.

Primary data collected with a multiple respondent survey design from 204 manufacturing firms located in major industrial cities in Pakistan were used. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) followed by hierarchical regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses.

The study finds that both relational and contractual governance mechanisms are positively related to a firm’s social sustainability-related knowledge acquisition, but their effectiveness is impacted by the structural facets of the network. Network size positively moderates the relationship between relational governance and social sustainability related knowledge acquisition, whereas both network range and strength of ties negatively moderate the relationship between contractual governance and social sustainability related knowledge acquisition.

Practitioners with resource-constrained firms should interact with their social network to leverage the knowledge and resources embedded within. The findings prescribe optimal governance strategies for different combinations of network structure variables to gain maximum knowledge about social sustainability.

The literature lacks information on the effect of network structure on the relationships between social network governance and social sustainability-related knowledge acquisition for resource-constrained firms in the developing economy context, making this study’s contributions unique.

Based on the theoretical background of stakeholder capitalism, the purpose of this paper is to contribute to the scientific debate on the topic of public–private partnerships (PPPs), considering in particular how this governance structure relates to the pursuit of sustainable development. Specifically, this objective will be pursued with a focus on stakeholder relations and governance aspects, to highlight enablers and barriers in change for sustainability.

The systematic literature review is applied starting with the use of keywords in Web of Science, which leads to the extrapolation of 629 articles on the topic of “PPP and sustainability”. Subsequently, through various skimming steps, 75 papers are sampled. A mixed (quantitative-qualitative) approach is then followed: a co-word semantic network to identify the pattern of discourse and a more in-depth and explanatory analysis of the papers. These quantitative and qualitative tools synergistically work together to evidence the main aspects related to the aim of the paper.

With reference to the governance structure and stakeholders of PPPs, the analyses highlight the shift towards a triadic type of relational governance that considers stakeholders (especially the community) in addition to public–private partners. This can improve the partnership's performance (particularly in sustainable development) and social legitimacy. With reference to the role of PPPs in the implementation of sustainable development, they have positive potential in terms of implementing sustainability and raising stakeholder awareness of it. Nevertheless, PPPs may entail risks to the implementation of sustainability. The findings lead to some concluding remarks on future research opportunities.

The research leads to some managerial implications, such as the need to follow a competitive collaboration approach among stakeholders, to develop relational governance skills and related managerial tools and to incorporate sustainability aspects starting from the design of PPPs.

The originality aspect of this research is the consideration of a PPP by relating it to the pursuit of sustainability. Such an inter-organizational structure could be suitable to deal with the complexity inherent in the implementation of sustainability and is peculiar in terms of governance and stakeholder relations, considering that it is characterised by the presence of several partners of different nature (public and private).

Key success factors (KSFs) of total productive maintenance (TPM) have historically played a vital role in attaining economic and ecological sustainability but have overlooked social sustainability. Hence, this study analyses and ranks the most significant TPM KSFs for attaining social sustainability in manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

The research employs a deductive methodology to identify the relevant TPM KSFs and social sustainability indicators and then uses Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to rank the TPM KSFs in order to achieve social sustainability, followed by a sensitivity analysis to assess the methodological robustness.

The findings indicate that the top five TPM KSFs influencing social sustainability are employee health and safety, organizational culture, top management commitment, employee engagement and effective communication and effective workplace management. In addition, the results indicate that effective equipment utilization is the least significant TPM key factor affecting social sustainability.

SME manufacturing managers do not need to worry about all of the TPM KSFs if they only concentrate on the ones that will have the most impact. If managers use the top 5 TPM KSFs as a starting point, they may create customized TPM training programs for their companies. As a result, this will facilitate the efforts of their personnel toward social sustainability.

In the existing literature, little emphasis has been paid to social sustainability and how SMEs may implement these practices. This research adds to the current theory of TPM and social sustainability and sheds light on how SMEs might use TPM to advance toward more socially sustainable operations.

This paper aims to identify and prioritize the dimensions that impact employee social sustainability in the airline industry in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The five main criteria (employee well-being, communication, management support, reward and control system and training) and 18 sub-criteria were identified from the literature. The sample comprised four experts covering the HR, finance and training functions from a major UAE airline organization. Applying the analytical-hierarchy-process (AHP) methodology resulted in obtaining priority weights for the factors assigned to employee-social-sustainability implementation.

Management support was found to have the highest priority among the study dimensions impacting employee social sustainability. Surprisingly, reward system was found to be the least important dimension.

The study was carried out on a single airline organization, limiting the generalizability of the findings. Future studies should be extended to cater to different organizational contexts and varying operational conditions.

The findings should be of value to human resource management and policymakers in developing countries, such as the UAE, where employee social sustainability should be sought as a means to develop an efficient and sustainable workforce in different industrial sectors.

This study is among the few pioneering studies that focus on employee social sustainability. The use of AHP to prioritize employee-social-sustainability dimensions is also considered pioneering within the field and is anticipated to support future studies, and a deeper understanding, of employee social sustainability.

The balancing of sustainability dimensions is the prime agenda of supply chain organisations. The supply chain sustainability greatly influenced by its freight transport activities. Most of the previous work discussed the economic and environmental sustainability of freight transport industry; although the social sustainability (SS) dimension paid less attention to researchers and practitioners of emerging economies. The purpose of this study is to investigate the importance of SS indicators in the freight transport industry. The SS assessment framework is validated with the Indian freight transport industry.

The proposed framework considers four SS dimension and 25 indicators. The SS indicators’ importance varies with the individual company's prospect. Therefore the proposed framework is used in multi-company perspective as well as in industry perspective to present more realistic results. The importance weight of SS dimension and indicators are computed with a novel multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method, i.e. fuzzy best–worst method (FBWM).

The prioritisation of SS indicators in each company perspective is compared with an industry perspective. The contribution to community health and education program is most valuable indicator followed by the prevention of child and forced labour. The model robustness is tested through sensitivity analysis and reported that less variation in indicators’ ranking.

To authors best of knowledge, this is the first study to highlight the importance of SS indicators in the freight transport industry. This study contributes to the sustainability assessment literature by providing a nuanced perception of the SS indicators and put forward managerial implications for improving the SS of the freight transport industry. The proposed framework could be treated as a benchmark for other developing nation's freight transport industry.

Typically, adoption of sustainability in organizations are often done in an unstructured way without the consideration of other partners in the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a coherent plan to improve sustainability in the supply chains utilizing ISO standards for environment and social responsibility.

This paper draws on literature on ISO14000 and ISO26000 to derive a set of variables applicable to supply chains, which are then prioritized for real organizations utilizing analytic hierarchy process.

The findings highlight that not all the variables of environmental, social and economic responsibility are equally important. Besides, the work reported in this paper justifies the application of multi-criteria decision-making (AHP) to prioritize elements of sustainability in context supply chains. The suggested method is illustrated using inputs from large manufacturing companies in Qatar.

ISO14000 and ISO26000 are well known standards; however, there was no effort to integrate these standards to improve sustainability in supply chains. The suggested methodology provides invaluable help to the managers to implement sustainability in a coherent manner across the supply chain.

The research contributes to the extant literature by proposing a new methodology based on the integration of three-approaches: Analytic Hierarchy Process, ISO14000 and ISO26000 systems.

This chapter aims to identify, analyse, classify and rank the sustainability indices and internationalisation challenges of the footwear industry in the emerging economy of Iran. This would provide deeper decision-making insights into Iranian footwear businesses. First, a list of sustainability indices and internationalisation challenges was obtained by reviewing the literature. Then, a combination of multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approaches was implemented. The initial sustainability indices and internationalisation challenges were screened using the fuzzy Delphi method, keeping a total of 14 criteria. The best–worst method (BWM) was employed to weigh and rank the criteria. The interpretive structural modelling (ISM) technique and cross-impact matrix applied in MICMAC were employed to visualise the conceptual model based on the levels and classification of the important criteria for the internationalisation of the Iranian footwear industry. The 14 criteria were demonstrated to be important in internationalisation. The most critical sustainability indices were reducing hazardous substances in leather tanning and labour education and training. In contrast, exchange rate instability in Iran’s economy and strict chemical regulations for clothing and footwear were found to be the most important internationalisation challenges. Hence, these criteria should be considered in the internationalisation strategies of the Iranian footwear industry. A combined multilayer sustainable decision-making approach was used to analyse the Iranian footwear industry’s essential sustainability indices and internationalisation challenges. Furthermore, implications and insights are offered to footwear businesses for future decision-making.