Three Essays on Sustainable Operations Management

Three Essays on Sustainable Operations Management
Author: Sara Hajmohammad
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays on sustainable operations management. The unifying theme in this work is the focus on sustainability-related risks originating from an organization's internal operations or its supply chain, operational-level initiatives for managing such risks, and the determinants and subsequent outcomes of those initiatives. The first essay focuses on safety and environmental risks and looks into the role of a safety-oriented culture in effectively managing them. Building on the safety culture literature and organizational support theory, a conceptual model is developed suggesting that a safety-oriented culture enhances an organization's financial performance and sets the stage for successful implementation of environmental and safety practices, which in turn, result in improved environmental and safety performance. The hypothesized relationships are empirically examined and validated using the data collected through a survey of 251 Canadian plants. The second essay is a conceptual paper focusing on supplier sustainability risks which materialize when buying organizations face their stakeholders' negative reactions to their suppliers' misconducts related to natural environment or society. The purpose of this paper is to explain the underlying factors of buying organizations' operational-level responses to such risks. Drawing on agency/management control and resource dependence theories, a contingent conceptual framework is developed that explains how three major factors - i.e., supply managers' perceived risk, dependence structure of buyer-supplier relationship, and the slack resources available to supply managers - interact to affect supply managers' choice among four risk management strategies: monitoring-based or collaboration-based sustainable supplier development (risk mitigation), supplier phase-out (risk avoidance), and taking no actions (risk acceptance). This framework also suggests that these contingent risk management strategies improve buying organizations' financial performance directly or indirectly through enhancing their organizational reputation. Finally, the third essay presents a vignette-based experiment conducted with a sample of 200 U.S.-based supply managers to empirically test and validate a set of propositions put forth in the second essay. Specifically, this study investigates and confirms the effect of three factors, i.e., supply manager's perceived risk, supplier dependence on the buying organization, and slack resources available to supply managers, and their interactions on supply managers' choice among the four risk management strategies.

Sustainability in Supply Chains

Sustainability in Supply Chains
Author: Thomas Leppelt
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2013-08-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3658026014

​Sustainability advanced to an omnipresent topic among academics and business leaders, while at the same time, a growing share of a firm’s total expenditure accounts for purchased products and materials. Even though suppliers become increasingly important for their buyers with regards to sustainability, academic research still lacks a detailed understanding of how sustainability considerations affect the relationship between buyers and suppliers. Thomas Leppelt contributes to extant sustainability literature across the research disciplines of supply chain management, management and marketing by cross-functionally investigating the effects of sustainability on supplier-buyer relationships from both a supplier and a buyer perspective. The results of in total three academic articles provide valuable insights on how buyers as well as suppliers deal with sustainability upstream and downstream the supply chain. The results indicate that sustainability leaders, in contrast to sustainability followers, intensively invest in sustainable supplier relationship management practices. Moreover, a became evident that the effective marketing of sustainability-related capabilities enhances a supplier’s reputation and can render comparative advantages, if it sends consistent positive signals to the market and if it integrates purchasing and marketing in the context of sustainability.

Three Essays in Supply Chain Management with Demand Dependencies

Three Essays in Supply Chain Management with Demand Dependencies
Author: Kunpeng Li
Publisher:
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008
Genre:
ISBN: 9780549909651

Product demand is an important component of business research. The formulation of demand functions is fundamental in model setups, and can be a direct factor in model results. Demand dependency is an important area in the study of demand functions. This dissertation fits in the demand dependency literature, where many interesting industrial phenomena have been explored, but many others have not yet been studied. In addition, the existing literature mainly focuses on pricing models. Very little has been done on quality design and analysis. This dissertation includes quality as a decision variable in various demand dependency models, investigates some interesting business scenarios, and provides insights to many managerial issues.

Essays on Sustainability and Management

Essays on Sustainability and Management
Author: Runa Sarkar
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-05-25
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9811031231

This book offers a comprehensive overview of sustainability and management in India and through its insightful essays highlights the complex and multifaceted nature of sustainability as a concept. It also demonstrates the debates surrounding the concept of sustainability and its ramifications for ground-level practice in managing organisations and for public policy. The contributions from sustainability enthusiasts, practitioners from disparate fields and academics working at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, have been divided into five themes: (1) sustainability as a normative concept; (2) sustainability concept at the global level, (3) sustainability practices in Indian organisations and consumer behaviour; (4) sustainability, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility and (5) sustainability: a critique of organisational practice and government regulation. The themes reflect both new and continuing issues confronting management in the country today. Examples and in-depth studies make it relevant to the grounded reality in India. The expertise and experience of the contributors ensure that readers are left with a grasp of our current understanding of how sustainability is related to society and business, the direction this understanding will take in the future.

Dynamic Modeling in Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management

Dynamic Modeling in Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Management
Author: Baolong Liu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

This thesis articulates several important issues in sustainable operations and supply chain management not only to provide insights for enhancing the performance of firms but also to appeal to the enterprises to adopt appropriate means for a better environment of our society. The link from firm level to society level is that, to improve the green performance through better operations management efficiency in firms and supply chains, is an indispensable element to ameliorate the environment in our society. Taking China as an example. Since a few years ago (The Straitstimes, 2017; Stanway & Perry, 2018), the government started to spare no effort in resolving the air pollution problems. An important and useful means is to put strict regulations and monitoring the efforts of firms which will face serious fine if certain standards are not met by random inspection. Therefore, firms have to cooperate for the betterment of its profitability and, more importantly, the environmental impacts. Throughout the endeavor, despite the uncertain future situation, the air quality has gradually improved in China (Zheng, 2018). This thesis, in a more general setting, aims to provide important insights to firms so that they are not only able to meet the regulations but genuinely to make contributions to building a better environment for our future generations. Basically, our goal is to obtain deep understanding of the trade-offs with which companies are faced, and to model the problems for seeking possible solutions and helping firms/supply chains to enhance their performance from a theoretical point of view. Then, indirectly, the work will help firms to realize the importance of developing sustainable operations and supply chain management means on our society. The structure of the thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 2 introduces the thesis in French. Chapter 3 is the first essay, Environmental Collaboration and Process Innovation in Supply Chain Management with Coordination. Chapter 4 includes the contents of the second essay, Remanufacturing of Multi-Component Systems with Product Substitution , and the third essay, Joint Dynamic Pricing and Return Quality Strategies Under Demand Cannibalization, is introduced in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 gives the general concluding remarks of the three essays which is followed by the reference list and the appendices.

Analyzing the Effect of Sustainability on Supply Chain Relationships

Analyzing the Effect of Sustainability on Supply Chain Relationships
Author: Sebastian Brockhaus
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2013-06-13
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3844102574

The notion of sustainability continues to increase in importance for businesses. Today consumers pay attention to the environmental impacts and social consequences of the products they use. Consequently, an increase in interest in the topic from an industry perspective has been observed and the topic is considered a megatrend in today’s global economy worthy of additional academic inquiry. This dissertation looks into the role that sustainability plays for companies in the current business environment and its effect on supply chain relationships. This book highlights the effects that introducing sustainability to a supply chain relationship has on the dynamics and structure of these relationships and provides a novel methodological approach to examine the issue. For the analysis, a theoretical framework of current management theories is assembled and the insights of each theory for sustainability in supply chain management are detailed. Through a qualitative and a quantitative research phase, the findings of this dissertation show, that sustainability and collaborative behavior in supply chain relationships positively affect each other. This manuscript provides insights for both research and practice. Theoretical and managerial implications are detailed and the findings are mirrored with the derived theoretical framework. This book therefore helps to promote the effective implementation of sustainability in supply chain management practice and elaborates the theory around the topic.

Handbook on the Sustainable Supply Chain

Handbook on the Sustainable Supply Chain
Author: Joseph Sarkis
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 615
Release: 2019
Genre: Business logistics
ISBN: 178643427X

Supply chain management has long been a feature of industry and commerce but, with increasing demands from consumers, producers are spending more time and money investing in ways to make supply chains more sustainable. This exemplary Handbook provides readers with a comprehensive overview of current research on sustainable supply chain management.