Balancing the Scales of Justice: Do Perceptions of Buyers’ Justice Drive Suppliers’ Social Performance?

Abstract

A major challenge for supply chain managers is how to manage sourcing relationships to ensure reliable and predictable actions of distant suppliers. The extant research into sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has traditionally focused on the transactional and collaboration approaches through which buyers encourage suppliers to act responsibly. However, little effort has been devoted to investigating the factors that underpin and enable effective implementation of these two approaches, or to exploring alternative approaches to help sustain an acceptable level of social performance from suppliers. Building on organisational justice theory, we developed a framework in which we propose that buyers' justice (i.e. distributive, procedural and interactional) as perceived by suppliers can serve as an alternative and complementary vehicle to the conventional sustainability governance approaches for driving the social justice exhibited by suppliers. The paper sheds new light on an alternative relational approach to help to restrain potentially harmful acts of suppliers. It provides a foundation for new research avenues in the SSCM context and supports more informed decision making by practitioners.

Social capital in buyer-supplier relationships: A review of antecedents, benefits, risks, and boundary conditions

“…An important research avenue therefore is to explore how the important relational aspect of perceived justice in BSRs can create the necessary conditions for the development of social capital. Justice is increasingly regarded as a foundation on which BSRs are established, continue, and evolve (Alghababsheh, Gallear, & Rahman, 2018). Although Kim et al's (2017) more recent study has examined the impact of fairness on the development of relational and structural capital, the study did not differentiate among the different dimensions of inter-organizational justice (i.e.…”

Developing a framework for enhancing survivability of sustainable supply chains during and post-COVID-19 pandemic

“…The global sustainability includes economic, social and environmental issues and enforces the firms to re-think and redesign their practices to manage their relationships with suppliers by collaboration or assessment (Ni and Sun 2018). Supplier's collaboration and governance are equally significant to manage their relationship with buyers for providing sustainable outcomes (Reuter et al 2010;Badraoui, Van der Vorst, and Boulaksil 2020;Alghababsheh and Gallear 2020). Due to coronavirus spread, life-threatening environment is persistent all around the world that is coercing undeniable regulations, stringent safety rules, long queue of public, stock out situations, and restricted working hours all together, has brought the whopping responsibility on firm's stakeholders, policymakers and government to manage their SCs in context to social, economic and environmental issues created in the economies (Cohen 2020;Sarkis et al 2020).…”

Socially Sustainable Supply Chain Management and Suppliers’ Social Performance: The Role of Social Capital

“…To deal with fiercely competitive business environments organizations very often seek to focus on their core competencies and achieve considerable cost savings by outsourcing some of their products and services to suppliers (Klassen and Vereecke 2012). To meet increasing buying firms' demands for better business deals involving cost reduction, higher order flexibility, and shorter lead time, under pressure suppliers, particularly those benefiting from weak regulatory environments, often turn to unethical actions some of which can amount to modern slavery practices, such as child labour, forced labour, and health and safety issues (Alghababsheh et al 2018;Mani et al 2016;Carne 2013). A recent report of the International Labour Organization (ILO) released in 2017 revealed shocking figures of 152 million people in child labour and 24.9 in forced labour across the world (ILO 2017).…”