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This paper analyses the effect of circular economy practices on sustainable supply chain performance. The study explores the impact of mediating variables such as supply chain flexibility and capabilities and the moderating role of supply chain integration in the relationship between circular economy practices and sustainable supply chain performance in Indian manufacturing firms. The study builds on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to conceptualise circular economy practices that influence supply chain capabilities, integration and flexibility, impacting sustainable supply chain performance.

This study adopted an online survey questionnaire distributed to managers of Indian manufacturing firms adopting circular economy practices. The data were analysed using SPSS Amos 25 and PROCESS macros.

The results suggest a positive impact of circular economy practices on sustainable supply chain performance in manufacturing firms. In addition, a supply chain manager's relationship with retailers is improved in the presence of supply chain capabilities and flexibility. Supply chain integration further strengthens this relationship as a moderating variable.

By examining the literature on circular economy practices and sustainable supply chain management, this study contributes to bridging the gap between supply chain capabilities, integration and flexibility using the S-O-R model. This study is possibly among the first to explore and provide empirical evidence on how circular economy practices in manufacturing firms can impact supply chain managers' experiences and thus help to improve environmental well-being. Both academics and business professionals might find these contributions interesting.

Implementing sustainable practices in multi-tier supply chains (MTSCs) is a difficult task. This study aims to investigate why such endeavours fail and how MTSC partners can address them.

A single-case study of a global food retail company was used in this study. Semi-structured interviews with the case firm and its first- and second-tier suppliers were used to collect data, which were then qualitatively analysed using thematic analysis.

Major barriers impeding the implementation of sustainability in multi-tier food supply chains were revealed such as the cost of sustainability, knowledge gap, lack of infrastructure and supply chain complexity. Furthermore, the findings reveal five possible solutions such as multi-tier collaboration and partnership, diffusion of innovation along the chain, supply chain mapping, sustainability performance measurement and capacity building, all of which can aid in the improvement of sustainability practices.

Future research should investigate how specific barriers and drivers affect specific aspects of sustainability, pointing practitioners to specific links between the variables that can aid in tailoring sustainability oriented investment.

This research supports managerial comprehension of MTSC sustainability, pointing out ways to improve sustainability performance despite the complex multi-tier system of food supply chains.

The research on MTSC sustainability is still growing, and this research contributes to the debate about how MTSCs can become more sustainable from the perspective of the triple bottom line, particularly food supply chains which face significant sustainability challenges.

The aim of the study has been performed to investigate the relationship between sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices and the cost performance of manufacturing firms in Bangladesh. Moreover, this paper highlights the key environment-friendly approaches and their association with financial performance in Bangladesh.

The paper empirically assesses sustainable supply chain performance using four major supply chain practices, including sustainable procurement, sustainable production, sustainable distribution and investment recovery, and compares it with the cost performance. Twenty-four variables were identified through different literature and distributed as a structured questionnaire among the managers appointed in different manufacturing firms in Bangladesh. An empirical study was conducted using the Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) technique to examine the hypothesized relationships.

The results find a positive relationship in two variables of sustainable supply chain practices, including sustainable procurement and investment recovery, while sustainable distribution negatively impacted cost performance. In addition, sustainable production found no effect on cost performance.

The paper emphasizes the financial perspective of a sustainable supply chain without explicit consideration of sustainability's environmental and social dimensions.

This study has implications for the literature on the SSCM approaches of manufacturing firms in the least developed economies. In addition, this study could work as a guideline for some manufacturing industries that prefer a policy or standard to alter their traditional supply chain management system to a sustainable supply chain.

The paper provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating the coordinated effect of SSCM practices on cost performance where variables of four specific activities of SSCM and cost performance are adopted from different studies. Further studies could be initiated, including some other eco-friendly supply chain variables, and the effect could be evaluated from an environmental perspective.

This chapter explores two business and innovation strategies to increase sustainability in a small-medium enterprise. The two strategies, one addressing the improved sustainability of an existing product line and the other addressing the development and implementation of a new product line, employ different supply chain sustainable practices and utilize different dynamic capabilities.

The chapter describes how sustainable supply chain management practices, sustainable new product development processes, and theories of dynamic capabilities interact to support a sustainable and differentiated strategy in the Alcass organization.

The models of sustainable supply chain management and sustainable new product development are applied to “more sustainable” products and “new sustainable” products, by raising different relevant practices as well as different supporting dynamic capabilities.

Despite increasing attentions to sustainable service supply chain management (SSSCM), a framework for performance evaluation of sustainable service only supply chain management (SSOSCM) is still missing. This paper tries to fill this gap and provides a novel conceptual framework.

The articles related to SSSCM are fetched from the databases of SCOPUS and Web of Science. Analysis of 174 articles identified by the systematic literature review is further carried out.

This research identifies the sustainable practices for service only supply chain (SOSC) as environmental management, social management, economic management, customer management, health, safety and risk management, technical sustainability, institutional sustainability, information and technology management as well as two performance measurement criteria as operational performance and organizational performance. This paper provides a novel conceptual framework for the performance evaluation of SSOSCM. The results call for future exploration in the following three broad directions-(1) customer's perception, involvement and their behaviour towards sustainability in SOSC context; (2) trade-off, incentive mechanism and multilevel evaluation for achieving sustainability in SOSC and (3) sustainability in SOSC from various point of views.

The managers can use the framework to assess the performance of the organization while researchers can explore the discussed research gaps.

This is the first paper that provides a novel conceptual framework for the performance evaluation of SSOSCM as well as potential future research directions.

This study explores the sustainable supply chain trade-offs in the electronics industry.

The study employs a social media analytics approach and analyses Twitter posts from August 2017 to December 2021. Thematic analysis is applied to discover the pattern in sustainable supply chain trade-offs based on the consumers' perceptions. In addition, a chi-square test was used to measure whether a relationship exists between product groups and sustainable supply chain perceptions.

The results indicate that environmental practices are the most frequent topic among consumers on social media. Further, although basic sustainable supply chain practices are prioritised in the environmental aspect, advanced sustainable supply chain practices take precedence over basic ones in the social dimension. The result from the chi-square independence test reveals that there is no significant relationship between different products and perceptions of consumers except for economically advanced sustainable supply chain practices.

The main implications of the present study are to offer a fast and efficient method to marketers and companies for discovering customer perceptions. In a way, they can identify where the quality of practices needs to improve in their supply chains to gain customer satisfaction. Additionally, the authors suggest industries declare their trade-off preferences between sustainable supply chain practices transparently.

The findings extend the abundance of sustainable supply chain literature by identifying the sustainable supply chain trade-offs among consumer electronics. Also, the reason for customers' dissatisfaction is provided. In the end, six propositions are presented based on the explorations.

Supply chains need to be made viable in this volatile and competitive market, which could be possible through digitalization. This study is an attempt to explore the role of Industry 4.0, smart supply chain, supply chain agility and supply chain resilience on sustainable business performance from the lens of natural resource-based view.

The study tests the proposed model using a covariance-based structural equation modelling and further investigates the ranking of each construct using the artificial neural networks approach in AMOS and SPSS respectively. A total of 234 respondents selected using purposive sampling aided in capturing the industry practices across supply chains in the UK. The full collinearity test was carried out to study the common method bias and the content validity was carried out using the item content validity index and scale content validity index. The convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs and mediation study was carried out in SPSS and AMOS V.23.

The results are overtly inferring the significant impact of Industry 4.0 practices on creating smart and ultimately sustainable supply chains. A partial relationship is established between Industry 4.0 and supply chain agility through a smart supply chain. This work empirically reinstates the combined significance of green practices, Industry 4.0, smart supply chain, supply chain agility and supply chain resilience on sustainable business value. The study also uses the ANN approach to determine the relative importance of each significant variable found in SEM analysis. ANN determines the ranking among the significant variables, i.e. supply chain resilience > green practices > Industry 4.0> smart supply chain > supply chain agility presented in descending order.

This study is a novel attempt to establish the role of digitalization in SCs for attaining sustainable business value, providing empirical support to the mediating role of supply chain agility, supply chain resilience and smart supply chain and manifests a significant integrated framework. This work reinforces the integrated model that combines all the constructs dealt with in silos so far in prior literature.

Drawing on multi-theoretical lenses and a combination of supply chain and business ethics literature, this study aims to investigate the role of motives in driving sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices and sustainable performance.

Using a sample of 205 supply chain companies in the USA, the authors apply structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis to empirically test the proposed model and seven hypothesized relationships.

Results of the study underscore the critical role of moral motives, while highlighting that all three types of motives (instrumental, relational and moral) are robust in driving SSCM practices and achieving improvement in all three dimensions of sustainable performance–economic, environmental and social.

This research can help supply chain scholars develop a more robust subfield of motivation-based SSCM research to gain a deeper understanding of how motives may differentially predict sustainable supply chain practices and performance.

The results of this study demonstrate the critical links between moral motivation and the triple bottom line (TBL) performance and suggest that managers pay more attention to moral motives in their decision-making.

This study bridges gaps in the extant literature by incorporating motivation-based antecedents, expanding the scope of SSCM practices, including the social dimension of sustainability and investigating the mediating effects of SSCM practices on the links between motives and the TBL performance.

Food supply chains are facing significant changes and challenges coming from the need to adopt inclusive business practices and foster sustainable development. The current research aims to provide insights related to the inclusiveness of sustainable business practices of a dairy production co-operative where the smallholders are engaging with a traditional business mind-set. The purpose of the research is to deliver insights about the linkages between accounting and business practices in the adoption of an inclusive business model.

This research is based on the qualitative case study of a medium-sized production cooperative company operating in the dairy industry supply chain.

This study answers the call for research on accounting and control systems in the food sector, by exploring how management and control system is practised within contemporary supply chains. The research aims to analyse the contextual insights of managerial and organizational practices that facilitate inter-organizational relationships and coordination among actors that engage along the supply chain.

The main limitation relates to the conditions of the time available and the limited number of interviews. Even if key actors were interviewed, a larger sample would have been more beneficial to the research. However, the lack of proper results for accounting tools and software access caused some loss to the research.

This paper emphasizes the effects of the “inclusiveness” of the sustainable business models between suppliers and leading companies by enhancing the sustainable business development within the supply chain, as part of a wider business model in the food sector from an inter-organizational perspective.

This chapter introduces the volume’s theme by describing the challenges of sustainability in the agri-food industry and the critical role of agri-food supply chains. Following a description of traditional and sustainable supply chain management practices, we discuss the likely characteristics of sustainability-oriented innovations and how organizations pursuing higher levels of economic, social, and environmental performance will need to adapt their capabilities.

Drawing on the emerging concepts and practices from sustainable supply chain management as well as traditional and emerging concepts from innovation, we develop general propositions and expectations about how organizations might address sustainable effectiveness in their supply chains. The importance of the agri-food industry to all three pillars of sustainable effectiveness and predictions about the inability to feed future populations gives the discussion a certain urgency.

Sustainability-oriented innovations in the agri-food supply chain are different from traditional innovations. We develop propositions regarding the driving motivations, their nature and scope (i.e., more radical and systemic than incremental and focused), and the importance of a multi-stakeholder approach. The 10 cases presented in the volume are summarized.