GAME OF GREEN THRONES. Sustainability Tensions and Power in Global Value Chains

Abstract

A rising literature suggests the benefits for organizations to take a paradox perspective toward tensions emerging when aiming at increasing corporate sustainability performance. We suggest that if companies have not full agency in responding to such tensions, the effectiveness of this approach can be heavily undermined. We argue this is especially the case of suppliers part of Global Value Chains (GVCs), which characterize an increasing number of industries. Suppliers are significantly constrained by their powerful lead firms in deciding how to address sustainability challenges, so that even if they are willing to manage sustainability tensions, they might finally not to, resulting in poor sustainability performance. By the mean of an in-depth analysis of a specific tensions, we investigate the role of agency in coping with sustainability related tensions using a paradox lens and adopting a multi-level perspective, considering the different actors part of the chain. Our analysis suggests that considerable tensions are generated by working in GVCs, because of the different framing of sustainability of buyers and suppliers, worsening the overall sustainability outcomes of the system despite the best intentions and effort of the actors engaged. Furthermore, we show that the management of such tensions depends on the agency of the actors, resolving in actions that emphasizes one pole of contradiction – the one of the most powerful actor. Accordingly, we contribute to a critical reading of paradox theory in sustainability by i) taking a GVC wide (vs organizational wide) perspective, responding to the call for a systems approach in paradox studies; and ii) focusing on a critical contextual condition in influencing the response that actors can implement in managing tensions: bargaining power.