Social Sustainability and Resilience in Supply Chains of Latin America on COVID-19 Times: Classification Using Evolutionary Fuzzy Knowledge

Abstract

The number of research papers interested in studying the social dimension of supply chain sustainability and resilience is increasing in the literature. However, the social dimension is complex, with several uncertainty variables that cannot be expressed with a traditional Boolean logic of totally true or false. To cope with uncertainty, Fuzzy Logic allows the development of models to obtain crisp values from the concept of fuzzy linguistic variables. Using the Structural Equation Model by Partial Least Squares (SEM-PLS) and Evolutionary Fuzzy Knowledge, this research aims to analyze the predictive power of social sustainability characteristics on supply chain resilience performance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic with representative cases from Mexico and Chile. We validate our approach using the Chile database for training our model and the Mexico database for testing. The fuzzy knowledge database has a predictive power of more than 80%, using social sustainability features as inputs regarding supply chain resilience in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic disruption. To our knowledge, no works in the literature use fuzzy evolutionary knowledge to study social sustainability in correlation with resilience. Moreover, our proposed approach is the only one that does not require a priori expert knowledge or a systematic mathematical setup.

Mining Public Opinions on COVID-19 Vaccination: A Temporal Analysis to Support Combating Misinformation

“…The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak brought the world the need for non-pharmaceutical sanitary measures and mobility interventions such as social isolation with physical distancing, which made work from home a reality while waiting for vaccines to ensure a safe return to normal activities [ 6 , 7 ]. Managers (whether in the public or private spheres) needed to learn to manage uncertainties to keep organizational activities running while dealing with different risks [ 8 ], especially at the personnel level.…”

Social Sustainability Orientation and Supply Chain Performance in Mexico, Colombia and Chile: A Social-Resource-Based View (SRBV)

“…In emerging Latin America, the study by Rodríguez et al [56] linked social aspects with value creation in industrial cooperatives in Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, and El Salvador. In Latin America, Reyna-Castillo et al [31] confirmed measures of social sustainability linked to corporate commitment in Mexico and Colombia, subsequently associating it with the resilience of the supply chain of suppliers in Mexico and Chile within the context of the pandemic [36].…”

“…Inclusion and diversity issues are also essential factors in corporate social sustainability [33,62]. Recently, in Latin economies, Reyna-Castillo et al [36] found the dimensions of Health and Safety, Labor Rights, Social Responsibility, and Inclusion relevant in the supply chain. Marshall et al [63] highlighted the importance of the Social Sustainability Orientation variable, which can be described as the cognitive (not necessarily practical) conviction about caring for social aspects within the firm.…”

“…Moreover, within the emerging context, there has been a notable predominance of Asia, with 30.3% of the research. For its part, emerging Latin America participates with only 6.1%, where 4.9% of the studies focus on the Brazilian supply chain (e.g., [20,21,35]) and 1.2% on Mexico (e.g., [36,37]) (Figure 1). Given the above, and beyond an academic vacuum on studies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as well as the current reality of the postpandemic crisis generated by the SARS-Cov 2 virus, it is urgent to explore the resources and capabilities that favor LAC economies' commercial and operational sustainability, especially now, when the expected recovery rebound is weakening faster than expected [39].…”

Mediating Role of Employees’ Societal Behaviors Amid Social Sustainability Orientation and Operational Performance: A Sem Approach

“…Attempts have been made to address this aspect of the freight transport sustainability (Awaysheh & Klassen, 2010;Morali & Searcy 2013;Lo et al, 2021), yet, it is unclear which key conceptions are applied in the field and how they connect to one another. Social dimension is mentioned in research (Ahi & Searcy, 2013;Ashby et al, 2012), although this idea is not the focus of their investigation (Reyna et al, 2022). Also, research demonstrates a lack of attention to social aspect of sustainable freight transport through use of empirical models (Mani, et al, 2016;El Amrani et al, 2021).…”