Green Initiatives in Logistics Social Responsibility: A Research on the Turkish Logistics Industry

Abstract

Marketing and logistics are two fields that complement each other. At the intersection of both fields, distribution is critical because what really matters to various stakeholders is to transfer products and/or services at the right time and place. In this respect, logistics service providers (LSPs) play an intermediate role among different actors in the supply chain domain. Like other organisations, LSPs strive for finding a balance between their economic objectives and their social and environmental responsibilities. Among these attempts, since social and environmental aspects provide long-term orientation, the need to focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in logistics comes to the fore more, which elicited the specific term of logistics social responsibility (LSR). Despite this need and importance, there is still uncertainty about what particular LSR activities, especially the environmental offerings as a subset of LSR, are provided by LSPs. Accordingly, this conceptual research aims to investigate how LSR issues are generally tackled and what green offerings are mainly performed by LSPs. Consequently, green initiatives adopted by LSPs through LSR can provide academic and practical insights into what LSPs currently do and what they can proactively do to achieve sustainable competitive advantage.