Abstract
In line with the current trend toward sustainability and CSR, organizations are pressured to assume extended responsibility. However, taking such a responsibility requires serious and challenging efforts as it appears to involve a wider range of issues and increased need for close interaction between actors along commodity chains. Using a qualitative case study approach, the present article focuses on Swedish public and private procurement organizations with attention paid to textiles and chemical risks. It focuses on two crucial aspects of buyers’ relationships with suppliers in their efforts to advance environmental responsibility-taking—monitoring and trust—as well as how they intersect. The aim is to demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, the limits and possibilities of monitoring and trust for developing extended upstream responsibility. The article demonstrates the problems with, on one hand, simple ritualistic monitoring and, on the other, simple trust, and explores potentially constructive pathways to extended upstream responsibility at the intersection of monitoring and trust. In connection with the findings, the article argues that theories on responsible and sustainable supply chain management must also take the enormous variety of organizations into account: not only large, private, transnational companies, which the literature has until now been preoccupied with.
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Notes
The monitoring part of the relation can then be restricted to only the selection phase, a practice common in public procurement. Indeed, one crucial moment in the development of extended upstream responsibility is when suppliers are selected, because once a supplier has been selected and the exchange and relationship have developed, there are considerable transaction costs and other path dependencies involved to prevent the partners from ending the exchange. Previous literature suggests that the selection of suppliers is primarily not carried out by the use of social and environmental standards, however. Kovács (2008) found that environmental selection and evaluation criteria are “just another” set of criteria according to which suppliers are evaluated. Nawrocka finds that a pre-selection is often already made when environmental criteria are set: “the pre-selection of suppliers for the contracted product may have hindered many companies from realizing the potential of selecting suppliers on environmental grounds” (Nawrocka 2008, p. 355).
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Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper was conducted within the research project “Chemicals in textiles: Managing environmental and health risks from products with complex product chains”, which was funded by The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies. I wish to express warm thanks to the other researchers in this project, to all the interviewees, to three anonymous reviewers, and to everyone who helped in various ways to complete this paper.
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Boström, M. Between Monitoring and Trust: Commitment to Extended Upstream Responsibility. J Bus Ethics 131, 239–255 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2277-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2277-6