State of Supply Chain Sustainability 2022
The Challenge of
Defining Supply
Chain Sustainability
A motivating premise of this research is that the term supply chain
sustainability (SCS) means a range of different things to different
people. Specifically, which areas should be included in a firm's
supply chain sustainability efforts? Which opportunities should
be prioritized? Should climate change mitigation be included?
What about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)? From a scientific
perspective, this poses a quandary: How can we ask people about
a topic without first defining it? But conversely, how can we define
it without unduly influencing their responses?
Since year one, we have chosen to resolve this research quandary
by appealing to an especially broad definition from a globally
recognized source. We base our definition of supply chain
sustainability on the United Nations Sustainable Development
Goals.
As defined in previous years:
We define supply chain sustainability as the management
of environmental and social impacts within and across
networks consisting of suppliers, manufacturers,
distributors, and customers in line with the UN Sustainable
Development Goals. This spans every phase of the supply
chain, from raw material sourcing and extraction to
product use and end of product life.
This is, admittedly, a very broad definition that allows for difference
of opinion. We believe that this dissensus around supply chain
sustainability is important-not only academically interesting,
but managerially relevant as well. Our work indicates that
sustainability pressures, goals, and practices change over time
and vary by geography and industry. Consider then that supply
chain professionals are responsible for projects that extend
across international boundaries and various industry sectors, and
for overseeing timelines that span multiple years. As one North
American interview subject working in healthcare logistics told
us, “As we work with different suppliers and start opening up discussions
on their sustainability issues, or [as we have] similar discussions with
customers, what we find is that each company's North Star, per se, is a
little bit unique to what they do." Therefore, knowing where and how
supply chain sustainability is interpreted differently is crucial for
firms in order to meet their goals as times and contexts change. We
hope that our ongoing efforts will help supply chain management
professionals to keep abreast of-and even ahead of-these changes,
for the good of business, society, and the planet.
Research Approach
This year's online survey was prepared in three languages:
English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. The survey was released
worldwide on October 25, 2021, and remained open until December
27. The survey yielded more than 3,300 usable responses.
Survey responses are completely anonymous; we do not collect
any information that individually identifies respondents or their
employers.
To assess the quality of the translations, we ran two tests: one
before the survey launched and one after it closed. First, after both
the Spanish and Mandarin translation teams completed their first
translation, the translation teams walked through their work side
by side with the MIT CTL research team. In these sessions, each
translated term was discussed and described using other words
to make sure the intended meaning was communicated across
languages and cultures. Wherever any confusion popped up, we
consulted additional native speakers to evaluate the translation
and offer suggestions. Secondly, after the survey was closed, we
conducted a Cronbach's alpha test on all responses, testing for
statistical reliability within and across translations, which showed
acceptable results. When tested both in aggregate and broken down
by language, the results passed this reliability test. (For more in-
depth discussion of our research approach and methodology, see
Appendix B.)
We also conducted 15 executive interviews. These interviews
served two purposes: First, insights from these professionals
guided the analysis conducted by our research teams. Second,
excerpts from those interviews are also included in this text to
give practical illustrations of our findings.
When making year-over-year comparisons, we chose to compare
only English-language responses from each of the three years. Our
reasoning is that we observed statistically significant differences
in the responses from the new language groups compared to the
English language group such that it would not yield a valid one-to-
one comparison. For the same reason, when we compare responses
by region, only the data collected in 2021 is included. Geographically,
we received enough responses to achieve a viable sample size from
employees offirmsheadquartered in five regions: North America, Latin
American & the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Unfortunately,
we did not receive a large enough sample of employees from firms
in the Middle East or Oceania to reliably analyze and compare their
results to other regions. The demographics and geographic locations
of our respondent group are shown in Figure 1.
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