Key issues related to social sustainability in textile industry
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2022
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
84
Series
Abstract
Despite the rapidly increasing public awareness of social injustice in the textile and apparel industries and the growing influence of activist groups fighting for fair working conditions, social sustainability in this field remains understudied. This is mainly due to the complicated nature of the multi-tier supply chains which includes numerous sub-tier suppliers from developing nations. The management and integration of social sustainability criteria across the extended supply chain should be explored from a more comprehensive and expansive perspective. For that reason, social sustainability management issues in lower tiers of multi-tier textile supply chains require significant attention in the literature. This thesis presents a systematic literature review of current literature and tries to answer the research question: “What are the key issues related to social sustainability in the multi-tiered supply chain operations of the textile industry with a sub-focus on developing countries & buyer-supplier relationship?”. The thesis was conducted as a combination of systematic literature review (SLR) and interpretive sense-making SLR (Durach, 2021). These methods were selected because it is seen as appropriate method for the supply chain management area since the topic is quite broad and most of the articles related to social sustainability were published in the last three years. Therefore, it will be a good presentation of the current situation of social issues and management practices in the industry. Based on the above-mentioned topics, 38 peer-reviewed articles were selected from the leading supply chain management journals and a conceptual framework is presented to integrate the findings related to social issues and related practices. The results show that the root causes of social issues are mainly due to a lack of transparency and assessment & detection of inefficiencies. Western buyers and developing nations’ suppliers are facing significant barriers due to various factors such as stakeholder pressure, regulations, information availability, competition, and lack of resources. Furthermore, it has been found that although both actors have certain challenges in implementation, major responsibility falls on western buyers. Findings indicate that western buyers should follow more collaborative action plans and improve assessment practices and sustainability reporting to increase transparency. Nevertheless, suppliers do encounter, and sometimes even create significant obstacles to enhancing social sustainability in the supply chain. Besides, literature is heavily focused on certain regions (e.g., Southeast Asia, Latin America) and rarely go down to Tier-3 and Tier-4. Therefore, a more empirical study is required, as well as qualitative and quantitative survey techniques, particularly at the level of lower-tier suppliers situated in developing nations.Description
Thesis advisor
Kauppi, KatriKeywords
social sustainability, labour practices, textile, apparel, fashion, supply chain, ethic