Editorial

Abstract

The challenge associated with balancing the three sustainability pillars – social, environmental and economic – has gathered a lot of management scholars’ attention over the past decade. Several events and tragedies have marked the need for academic research on the accountability of major organizations pertaining to their suppliers’ environmental and social practices. Such accountability is even going further upstream the supply chain to the second and third tier supply chain. Despite the popularity and development of the accounting field on matters of environmental or social challenges in supply chain over the past three decades (Bebbington and Larrinaga, 2014), scholars recently noted that applied research in the accounting field pertaining to these issues remain limited (Lee and Schaltegger, 2018). This is specifically the case for social issues in the global supply chain. Social sustainability has received less attention than the other dimensions of sustainability in supply chain research, as the majority of research is aimed toward environmental or economic aspects of sustainability (Seuring and Muller, 2008; Lee and Wu, 2014). Yet, social challenges in the supply chain particularly in developing economies continue to grow (Huq et al., 2016; Jacobs and Singhal, 2017; Sodhi and Tang, 2018).