Sustainable supply chain management in emerging markets: A focus on India
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2023
Department
Major/Subject
Mcode
Degree programme
Information and Service Management (ISM)
Language
en
Pages
65 + 30
Series
Abstract
Sustainability within supply chains is a growing concern for companies worldwide as pressure from stakeholders including the government and customers is increasing. While sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has been more widely researched in Western countries, research from emerging markets is still lacking. Specifically, there is a need to look at SSCM at a country-level as emerging markets vastly differ from each other with respect to characteristics such as infrastructure or culture. This Master’s thesis aims to evaluate the current state of SSCM in the emerging market of India, which is estimated to become the second-largest economy in the world within the next 30 years. Additionally, no previous attempts to the author’s knowledge have been made at compiling all the research in the Indian context. This research was conducted as a systematic literature review analysing fifty-six different research articles published on SSCM in the Indian context. A rigorous methodology was followed based on existing systematic literature reviews to determine the type of article that was included or excluded from the research sample. After the selection of articles, an analysis was conducted to answer the research questions presented in the thesis. The research questions were the following: How has SSCM research developed in India? What are the current SSCM themes in India and what is influencing them? What are the gaps in SSCM research, and as a result, where should future research focus? The findings indicate that SSCM is still a limited yet quickly growing topic in India. The overall quality of published research is still developing to its full potential while a large variety of methods is already being used to assess a variety of SC questions. Most of the sustainability efforts in SCM in India have been placed on manufacturing-based industries, while efforts in service-based industries are still extremely limited. In terms of managerial findings, three major themes of practices were identified: internal, external, and technology. Internal practices refer to those inside the company, external practices to those that require collaboration with external stakeholders, and technology practices to those that utilize tech to implement SSCM. Out of these, internal practices were most prominent while the role of technology is projected to grow in importance over the upcoming years due to the projected economic growth. Pathways for future research include topics such as gender equality and supply chain decision-making under ambiguity. Overall, there is a need to improve research quality. In terms of theoretical contributions, this thesis proposes a framework for SSCM in the Indian context using the existing theoretical model for SSCM in emerging markets by Silvestre (2015) as a building block.Description
Thesis advisor
Kauppi, KatriKeywords
sustainable supply chain management, SSCM, emerging market, India