Manufacturing sustainability: Institutional theory and life cycle thinking

Abstract

This study sets out to bridge resource perspective on material selection with stakeholder and institutional theory considerations to provide a more comprehensive understanding of life-cycle thinking on material selection decisions in the automotive industry. The objective is to shed light on how regulatory, normative and mimetic institutional pressures, affect sustainability decisions when switching or substituting materials or manufacturing processes in the automotive industry. Within a hybrid life cycle analysis framework, the environmental hotspots across the supply chains of two empirical management examples of Aluminium and CFRP LCA models are presented, quantified and ranked. Further justifications are provided on why and how regulatory, normative-peer and peer-normative pressures affect life cycle decisions. Findings reveal early, mid-process and late-stage life cycle hotspots, both in the material selection and the manufacturing process for both components. This decision support framework can be used to diverge from high energy-intensive manufacturing process and conventional raw materials, and provide forward-looking automotive manufacturers with opportunity to make asset-specific investments in lightweight, fuel-efficient vehicles, and sustainable manufacturing operations. This study presents a new framework that hybridises institutional theory and life cycle thinking to enable a standard routine and decision assessment of sustainability. This study provides a novel theoretical perspective on life cycle assessment by highlighting how the framing rules in a given institution mirror the trajectory of institutional pressures from regulatory (organised laws) through normative (organised behaviour) to mimetic (copied behaviour).