Stakeholder management in sustainable supply chains

This dissertation examines stakeholder management in the context of sustainable supply chain management. Since ecological deterioration and social discrepancy keep increasing, sustainability is considered one of the most significant challenges in our current time. Due to the growing public awareness of the environmental and social sustainability issues, multiple stakeholders drive the need to implement sustainability into SCs and hold the focal firms responsible for the actions of the entire SC. Stakeholder management thus plays an essential role for focal companies in incorporating sustainability into SSCM. Because of the continuous change of stakeholder interests, companies need specific capabilities to realign their practices and the associated resource composition continuously. The interface between stakeholders and SSCM is relatively undifferentiated researched. This dissertation addresses this intersection by answering the following two overall-research questions:

1. How can SSCM practices be applied in a dynamic environment with changing stakeholders and sustainability issues?
2. How can stakeholders contribute to achieving a more sustainable SC, and how can they be integrated? These two overarching research questions are answered in a combination of structured literature studies and empirical case studies. While the literature studies seek to synthesize and comprehensively analyze the current scientific discourse, the case studies allow an in-depth examination of phenomena in an empirical context, understand them, and draw appropriate conclusions. For addressing the complexity of the phenomena of DCs in the SSCM context, this dissertation analyzes for the first time the evolution of DCs in the SSCM literature for two different industries from a temporally isolated perspective (see 1st research question). This new methodological approach of analyzing literature samples based on a temporal perspective represents a possible further development of the previously used structured literature analyses for the DCs field and the entire SSCM discourse. Furthermore, the previous academic discourse treats stakeholder management as an undifferentiated and broad construct. This thesis elaborates and specifies this theoretical construct in more depth and proposes that corresponding practices exist at the internal and external levels of the company. These practices can be structured along two dimensions, "practices to address stakeholder requirements" and "practices in which stakeholders are integrated." For example, stakeholders can provide access to knowledge and other resources to develop suppliers according to sustainability requirements. Thus, focal companies should not only build structures and develop necessary capabilities to communicate with stakeholders, but they should also proactively integrate them into business processes. In addition, this thesis addresses stakeholders' roles to contribute to a more sustainable supply chain (see 2nd research question). This thesis suggests that stakeholders at both the internal and external corporate levels can actively participate in the sustainable transformation of SC. For example, stakeholders can help focal companies engage with suppliers out of their reach due to limited visible horizons along their SC. Moreover, this paper shows that in the current SSCM discourse, stakeholders and their possible roles have been considered in a relatively undifferentiated way. Future research projects could address this. For instance, a more differentiated view would create a better understanding of how stakeholders can contribute to a more sustainable SC. Regarding this research gap, the thesis elaborates on possible stakeholder roles in the SSCM context and offers empirical insights into a possible realization of stakeholder integration. This thesis contains limitations regarding the chosen methodology and the theoretical models. For example, the predominantly qualitative approach can be criticized for common limitations of validity, reliability, and generalizability, although measures have been taken to minimize these limitations. For example, each of the present studies is based on established theoretical constructs and thus follows a theoretically grounded research question. This theoretical grounding provides the opportunity to interpret and classify results accordingly. As a further consideration regarding this thesis, a cross-case research design would be interesting, which could help clarify the theoretical implications of the view and examine the extent to which they are merely idiosyncratic to the initial case study. Ultimately, more research is needed to fill the identified research gaps in the SSCM discourse and thereby address current environmental and social sustainability problems.