Beyond Buyers: The Role of Civil Society Organizations and Consumers in Promoting Buyers' Justice and Social Capital in Supply Chains

Abstract

In today's supply chain management, managing sourcing relationships has become a challenging real-world problem. To tackle social deficiencies, the study focuses on socially sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices such as assessment and collaboration that can encourage suppliers to act responsibly. Scholars have made considerable effort to investigate how the implementation of SSCM practices can effectively sustain suppliers' social performance. The study aims to build a framework that explores the individual impact of assessment and collaboration practices on suppliers' social performance. It also investigates whether buyers' justice, including distributive, procedural, and interactional justice, and social capital factors such as relational, cognitive, and structural capital, can complement the SSCM practices to sustain suppliers' social performance. Through survey analysis of companies in Karachi, it has been found that assessment and collaboration practices are ineffective in improving suppliers' social performance. Furthermore, buyers' justice and social capital factors showed no significant impact on the relationship between assessment and collaboration practices and suppliers' social performance. Nevertheless, this study highlights the importance of justice and social capital dimensions and calls for further research to understand their impact on SSCM and suppliers' social performance.