Annachiara Longoni

Purpose: This study examines the relationship between the reverberation of follow-up news of a firm's human rights allegations concerning working conditions on share price volatility and social score. These allegations may generate reputational risks that are amplified by NGO and media coverage, thereby shaping financial and social analysts' evaluations of the firm's ability to manage such risks. We also test whether the adoption of human rights policies moderates these potential negative effects. Design/methodology/approach: To test our hypotheses, we constructed a firm-year panel comprising 147 US-based firms from 2015 to 2022. We combined data on human rights allegations against firms and their follow-up news from the Business and Human Rights Research Center, sustainability information from the Bloomberg ESG module, financial data from Compustat and stock market data from the CRSP database. Findings: Our results show that follow-up news reverberation of a firm's human rights allegations is associated with reduced share price volatility, as sustained information may make a firm's actions more visible and predictable to shareholders. Conversely, this reverberation negatively affects a firm's social score, especially in the case of negative follow-up news and in the presence of human rights policies. Reverberation may reveal a decoupling between a firm's stated commitments and its actual behavior regarding human rights. Originality/value: This paper reframes human rights allegations as reputational and human rights risks perceived by investors and social evaluators, who respond differently based on the reverberation of such allegations as amplified by NGOs and the media.

Last-mile delivery platforms have recently emerged as effective business models to match supply and demand, even though they have been criticized for potentially exploiting their workers. This paper investigates the corporate sustainability and socio-economic trade-offs of platform companies in relation to working conditions (i.e., work relationships, social subsystems, and technical subsystem). A survey of 392 paid-per-order workers from six food delivery platforms across Spain was conducted to validate our research framework. Our findings provide a nuanced understanding of the impact of working conditions on corporate sustainability in platform companies. On the one hand, there are positive implications for both social and economic sustainability in the presence of higher earnings, rights and protections, and empowerment for workers. Conversely, prolonged work relationships between workers and platform companies are negatively related to workers’ perceived stress and individual performance. Based on these insights, we advance our understanding of how platform companies can deal with conflicting objectives regarding working conditions by adopting an instrumental approach in the case of short-term workers and an integrative approach with long-term workers.

Supply chain management is grounded on the assumption that endless economic growth is compatible with environmental and social sustainability. Yet scholars from ecological economics question this assumption due to ever increasing evidence showing how hard it is to decouple growth from negative environmental and social externalities. In response, pressure from social movements is mounting, and the agendas of several countries already consider alternatives to growth. Therefore, this article presents a critical thought experiment for the supply chain management discipline: What are the implications of moving from the current endless growth paradigm to a post‐growth paradigm for businesses and their supply chains? Using the umbrella term “post‐growth,” this article identifies three key post‐growth principles—(i) socio‐ecological wellbeing, (ii) selective downscaling, and (iii) systems thinking—and then examines their implications for supply chain management research and practice.

Supply chains often match the supply of labour to uncertain demand by using precarious workprecarious workers. This increases flexibility and lowers costs for the supply chain by shifting risk to the workers and costs to society. Supply chains are maximizing profits, often literally, on the backs of their workers by creating serious negative externalities for society. We address this issue using a powerpower perspective because powerpower is asymmetrically oriented against workers in many supply chain contexts. This allows us to identify examples of how to reverse this trend and shift powerpower back to workers. The goal is to get to where stakeholders understand the costs and limited benefits of precarity, where we can separate the notion of flexibility from low costs, and where through a combination of incentives, policy, social norms of ethical behaviour, and consumer action, we can get to a better place than where we are now.

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a starting point to discuss how social enterprises can drive systemic change in terms of social impact through operations and supply chain management.Design/methodology/approach: This paper reviews existing literature and the four papers in this special issue and develops a conceptual framework of how social enterprises and their supply chains create social impact and further enable systematic change.Findings: Our paper finds that social impact and systemic change can be shaped by social enterprises at three different levels of analysis (organization, supply chain and context) and through three enablers (cognitive shift, stakeholder collaboration and scalability). Such dimensions are used to position current literature and to highlight new research directions.Originality/value: This paper proposes a novel understanding of operations and supply chain management in social enterprises intended as catalysts for systemic change. Based on this premise we distinguish different practices and stakeholders to be considered when studying social impact at different levels. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper provides a new pathway for future research and debate by scholars engaged at the intersection of social impact, sustainable operations and supply chain management.

An emerging body of work acknowledges the challenges focal firms face in gathering material information about their extended supply chains and begins to point to the role of supply chain structure in influencing supply chain transparency. Still, large‐scale empirical evidence on this complex association remains elusive, especially at the supply chain level of analysis. We begin to bridge this empirical gap by examining whether supply chain structure systematically associates to supply chain transparency in the context of the collective public environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures made by a focal firm's customers, suppliers, and subsuppliers. To shed light on this underexplored empirical phenomenon, we gather Bloomberg SPLC data and Bloomberg ESG data about 4803 firms and 20,504 contractual ties organized in 187 extended supply chains. We find that supply chain density positively associates with supply chain transparency, whereas supply chain clustering holds a negative association. We also find that supply chain geographical heterogeneity positively associates with supply chain transparency. Our results significantly expand the literature on supply chain transparency and are relevant to supply chain professionals because they emphasize the central role of supply chain structure in enabling or constraining supply chain transparency.

This paper aims to examine the role of national culture in the relationship between sustainability practices (social and environmental practices) and sustainability performance (social and environmental performance). While previous literature has focused on the influence of national culture on the decision-making and ethical behaviors of managers, the role of national culture on the effectiveness of sustainability practices has been rather neglected. Our study addresses this gap by highlighting the relevance of national culture as a contextual element when implementing sustainability practices in different countries. Based on a multi-level regression analysis using data from 484 firms in nine countries (China, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Slovenia, and Sweden), we found that the impact of social practices on social performance is accentuated in countries characterized by high uncertainty avoidance and high masculinity. The impact of environmental practices on environmental performance, however, is not affected by national culture.

Social enterprises are acquiring an increasingly relevant role as focal organizations for managing supply chains to address social problems. We argue that the presence of misaligned institutional logics between these focal organizations and their supply chain stakeholders generates tensions. Building on institutional theory and paradox theory, we analyzed seven dyadic relationships between a single focal social enterprise with a goal of migrant integration and its supply chain stakeholders. We propose relationship management mechanisms related to relationship governance, power, and trust to manage such tensions. We observe the application of different relationship management mechanisms relative to different types of tensions. Finally, we relate different relationship management mechanisms to specific tension management approaches referred to as complementarity, acceptance, and accommodation, and offer propositions based on our findings.

Purpose: Little empirical work has been done on the effects of inclusive environmental disclosure and green supply chain management (GSCM) on firm outcomes. The literature on environmental disclosure suggests that it is a useful practice to improve a firm’s reputation and its financial performance and also to establish a dialogue with stakeholders improving environmental performance. Recent conceptual contributions in the supply chain management literature state that stakeholder expectations and informational needs increasingly concern firm supply chains. Thus, the authors propose that positive effects of inclusive environmental disclosure practices are enhanced in presence of GSCM practices. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach: To test these relationships a combination of primary data on environmental disclosure practices, GSCM practices and environmental performance, and secondary data on financial performance was used. A series of hierarchical regression models were performed to test the disclosure-outcome relationships and the moderation of GSCM practices.Findings: Results provide empirical support for the impact of inclusive environmental disclosure practices on financial performance but no support for the impact on environmental performance. Specifically, the more inclusive the environmental disclosure practices the greater and positive is the impact on financial performance in presence of GSCM practices.Originality/value: This study provides empirical evidence of the joint effects of inclusive environmental disclosure and GSCM practices on environmental and financial performance. Doing so, it reinforces the recent conceptual foundation that firms should align and leverage on supply chain management for disclosure practice effectiveness.

Supply chain research and practice has moved beyond green or environmental issues to include social issues. But much of the focus still remains on attempts of large companies to reduce social harm along their supply chains rather than creating social good. At the same time, research investigating the role of NGOs in supply chains or humanitarian logistics often emphasizes temporary initiatives and overlooks long‐term viability. This conceptual paper seeks to expand the playing field by looking at how social enterprises manage their supply chains to generate social benefit while maintaining or improving their financial viability in the long term. Our contribution is to consider those socially motivated organizations that lie on the continuum between purely social and purely commercial enterprises. We consider how these organizations manage their supply chains for social impact and define this area as social impact supply chain management (SISCM). In this work, we view these organizations and managerial issues through the lens of institutional complexity, that is, the presence of multiple and possibly conflicting institutional logics in the focal organization. We propose that, for these organizations, supply chain strategy, stakeholder identification and engagement, and relationship management might differentiate SISCM from traditional supply chain management. And as a result, we offer future research directions that might add clarity to effective SISCM.