Abstract
This paper discusses the nature of sustainability and sustainable development as they relate to operations management. It proposes a typology for sustainable operations management that is based on the life cycle stages of a product and the three dimensions of corporate social responsibility. The aim is to show how this typology development could provide a useful approach to integrating the diverse strands of sustainability in operations, using industrial ecology and carbon neutrality as examples. It does this by providing a focused subset of environmental concerns for an industrial ecology approach, and some research propositions for the issue of carbon neutrality.
Highlights
Sustainability and sustainable development are terms that have become prominent in everyday life over recent years, associated with the debates around global warming and corporate social responsibility
This paper considers the issues of sustainability and sustainable development in the management literature, and considers briefly how business has adopted these ideas through the notions of corporate social responsibility and corporate sustainability
We reviewed some of the approaches in the literature to applying these concepts to operations management, how the field has changed from a study of plant-level environmental practices to the more ‘systemic issues that exist at the intersection of sustainability, environmental management and supply chains’ (Linton et al 2007:1075), and the increased need to consider the ‘cradle-to-grave’ approach of life-cycle analysis in products and services (Graedel, 1997; Mihelcic et al, 2003)
Summary
Sustainability and sustainable development are terms that have become prominent in everyday life over recent years, associated with the debates around global warming and corporate social responsibility. These themes have gained increased profile in such recent films as An Inconvenient Truth (Bender & David, 2006) and The Corporation (Achbar & Simpson, 2003). The current concern for the environment and increased awareness of global warming means the sustainable management of these resources and systems has become very important. This paper makes an attempt to integrate much recent work on sustainability in the OM area into a typology that might be useful for researchers and practitioners. The paper attempts to develop a typology based on the elements of life cycle analysis and the triple bottom line
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