Be resilient today to be sustainable tomorrow: Different perspectives in global supply chains

Abstract

Supply chains (SC) are continually evolving, adjusting their structure, and becoming more global over time. However, an increasing number of disruptive and unanticipated critical events threaten the continuity of global SCs. This has led institutions and business organizations to enact resilience-oriented policies and strategies to make them able to survive and grow. Dealing with resilience, scholars have recognized two main approaches, the engineering, and the socio-ecological ones. Against this backdrop, the main aim of this work is to investigate the individual and the conjoint effects that these two approaches can have on SC long-term sustainability. Drawing on SC resilience and sustainability research, a taxonomy of some drivers of engineering and socio-ecological resilience has been proposed, which have lately been tested assuming the triple helix model perspective. Then, an exploratory content analysis has been conducted on some reports that three different actors (institutions, universities, and companies) published over the last three years to understand the influence and the possible implications of resilience for SC sustainability. The findings indicate that institutional communication regarding resilience and sustainability remains fragmented, even though the triple helix actors appear synergistic in developing a broad framework for enhancing SC resilience. This work represents one of the first attempts to empirically test and describe the way different socio-economic actors approach the possible relationship between resilience and sustainability. It also offers some interesting insights for both theory and practice, related to the main drivers of resilience and their implications for sustainability, and to the strategic approaches that can support companies to quickly react to unexpected and disruptive events.