Sustainable supply chain management: taxonomy, gaps, and future directions

Over the past few decades, there have increasing concerns about the negative impacts of business activities on the environment and society. Business activities have been straining earth’s rare resources, producing massive air, water, and land waste, and creating undesirable social consequences. There has been growing amount of research about sustainability as well as an increasing number of companies that show efforts to integrate sustainability into their operations. However, the accumulative literature is still maturing at the micro levels and is currently fragmented. The existing studies reside in the level of understanding the phenomenon and building theories. In particular, there is limited understanding of the role of Information Systems / Information Technologies (IS/IT) in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). This paper aims to illustrate the landscape of SSCM literature via the provision of taxonomy of existing studies in the SSCM area. The proposed taxonomy identifies key elements of existing SSCM studies including theoretical lenses, dimensions of Triple Bottom Line, unit of analysis, context, level of analysis, research design, outcome, and IS/IT aspects. Guided by the taxonomy, we highlight a number of knowledge gaps and identify future research directions.