Abstract
Supply chain management (SCM) concerns itself with the integration of a firm’s internal management processes with the external environment. This could explain why sustainability has been embraced by scholars who study SCM. This bibliometric review was untaken with the explicit goals of updating and extending prior reviews of research on sustainable SCM (S-SCM). The goals of this research were to document the scope and development of S-SCM research; identify influential journals, authors, and documents; analyze the intellectual structure of this field of sustainability inquiry, and highlight emerging topics on the frontier of S-SCM inquiry. By using bibliometric tools, a relatively large and rapidly growing corpus of peer-reviewed research documents concerned with S-SCM were found. Citation analyses of journals, authors, and documents yielded a surprisingly high level of scholarly content for a literature body of such recent vintage. The author co-citation analysis revealed three coherent but closely connected groups of thought that comprise the intellectual structure of this knowledge base. Finally, the analysis identified a constellation of topics concerned with the integration of internal processes (e.g., decision-making, manufacturing, sensitivity analysis, risk assessment, life-cycle assessment) and the organizational environment (e.g., climate change, gas emissions, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases, energy utilization, climate change). The results of this research concluded that SCM practitioners and scholars may have embraced sustainability more than any other field of management.
Highlights
Over the last six decades, management scholars have investigated various supply chain management (SCM) models [1,2,3,4,5,6]
A key development in the evolution of SCM has been a focus on “sustainability” in business and society [1,9,11,12]. This focus has prompted management practitioners and scholars to inquire into how SCM could contribute to waste reduction, more efficient resource use, energy conservation, and fewer detrimental environmental effects [5,9,11,12,13,14,15]. This has led to the emergence of a growing subfield of SCM known as sustainable supply chain management (S-SCM) [2,5,7,11,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]
The long-tailed distribution in Figure 2 supports the conclusion that, after a 15-year period of slow growth in the 1990s and 2000s, this body of literature experienced an explosion of activity; 93% of the collected literature was published after 2010 and 65% of it between 2016 and 2018. This reflects a remarkable increase in interest in S-SCM topics and explains, to some extent, the difference in size between our dataset and those featured in prior bibliometric reviews of the S-SCM literature [1,2,4]
Summary
Over the last six decades, management scholars have investigated various supply chain management (SCM) models [1,2,3,4,5,6]. A key development in the evolution of SCM has been a focus on “sustainability” in business and society [1,9,11,12] This focus has prompted management practitioners and scholars to inquire into how SCM could contribute to waste reduction, more efficient resource use, energy conservation, and fewer detrimental environmental effects [5,9,11,12,13,14,15]. Four research questions (RQs) are addressed in this research and listed as follows
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