Responsible innovation and ethical corporate behavior in the Asian fashion industry: A systematic literature review and avenues ahead

Abstract

Fashion firms have transferred their manufacturing processes to Asia, seeking minimum labor costs, supported by the academic literature’s proposals for alternative supply chain configurations to maximize profits. Fashion industry has undergone public analysis, facing demands for greater transparency about environmental and social sustainability. The growing public awareness of sustainability issues has led firms to declare their commitment to sustainable resources, but few changes have been registered. United Nations Economic Commission for Europe listed technological innovation as a key tool for making the fashion industry transparent and traceable regarding sustainability and circularity. The research and responsible innovation framework indicate appropriate ways to manage innovation from a responsible and ethical perspective, according to ethical corporate behaviour (ECB), particularly in the industries characterized by productive phases processed in more countries, such as the fashion industry. However, the linkages between responsible innovation, ECB towards innovative and sustainable business models, and their conceptualization, are still unclear in the fashion industry, achieving the goals included in the UN 2030 Agenda. This study draws on bibliometric analysis and systematic review of the literature on 114 articles published between 1990 and 2021 allows to identify the above issues in the research domains, and outline the evolutionary trajectories, as well as to explore the literary corpus about responsible innovation (RI) in the ethical corporate behaviour (ECB) of the fashion industry and its Asian suppliers. The results highlight that fashion brands strive to develop RI and ECB along their supply chain. Still, the misalignment of corporate ethics and cultural values represents a significant obstacle to the adoption of business models, especially to achieve the goals of UN 2030 Agenda. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that discusses RI as enabling driver in the ECB for fashion companies also defining a future research agenda including RI, ECB, iSBMs towards SDGs.

Digitalization and artificial knowledge for accountability in SCM: a systematic literature review

“…It is also a well-established approach in SCM research (Durach et al, 2017;Snyder, 2019;Donthu et al, 2021;Lim et al, 2022). The SLR enables the systematization and classification of key findings in the research area, emphasizing unknown characteristics so as to develop directions for future research (Kraus et al, 2022;Martins et al, 2019;Paul et al, 2021;Di Vaio et al, 2022b). The advantages of SLR analysis include: better result quality (Christofi et al, 2017); minimization of distortions (Dada, 2018); greater validity and replicability (Wang and Chugh, 2014); a clearer roadmap for the field under study (Kauppi et al, 2018); and the prediction of various factors that build a novel conceptual framework as future research agenda (Dada, 2018;Lim et al, 2022).…”

“…According to Bornmann et al (2018), nodes in the co-occurrence map show the correlations between two terms. Following Di Vaio et al (2022b), in this study, we selected 16 keywords (specifying the minimum number of keyword occurrences to six) and assessed the intensity of co-occurrence links with other keywords. Subsequently, we identified two separate clusters, distinguished by color in green and purple, respectively.…”

What does “sustainable supply chain management” really mean? A contribution to bridging the gap between research, education and practice

“…Khan et al, 2021b). To make SCs truly sustainable, CSR should ideally be reflected within all firms that are part of SCs, which also requires the development of individuals' ethics (Di Vaio et al, 2022). Indeed, ethics has become important and is now considered necessary "[for managing] SC sustainably" (Fritz, 2019, p. 9) due to sustainability having become part of society's normative expectations.…”

“…Based on the interviewees' answers, it is important to consider SSCM in addition to other complementary aspects such as collaboration, the involvement of top management, stakeholder engagement and ethical considerations. Ethical considerations were also highlighted in a recent study that focussed on the fashion industry (Di Vaio et al, 2022), which determined that, to make SCs truly sustainable, top management and suppliers need to collaborate on an ethical alignment of corporate values. The results of the present study complement Di Vaio et al's (2022) study by extending it to other sectors [2].…”

Digital transformation, smart technologies, and eco-innovation are paving the way toward sustainable supply chain performance

“…19 EI encourages the organization to transform technologically and use eco-friendly solutions for toxic reduction, waste management, and enhancing performance. 20 Some scholars 21 had brought to attention that responsible technological innovations acted as one of the key pillars to achieve sustainability and proposed to investigate it through empirical studies. DTs have become an essential part of management due to their analytical and forecasting usability, and empirical research about the potential of these DTs to achieve sustainability could further strengthen the competitive advantages of the organizations.…”