Sustainability has become a popular topic, not only in business research at large, but specifically in the supply chain management (SCM) discipline. In addition, the business ethics (BE) field has an extensive stream of literature focusing on supply chain topics. While some exchange of ideas can be witnessed, the two streams developed largely independently. A key purpose of this article is to examine and contrast existing research and knowledge creation, focusing on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues in supply chains, within and across these two disciplines. The in-depth systematic literature review covers 195 articles, published in 12 peer-reviewed journals from 2007 to 2013, examining the methodological and theoretical approaches, as well as the main research focus areas. We found highly complementary research topic areas but only limited synergy and dialogue between the disciplines. The research area at large would benefit from greater integration. Based on our findings, we propose a future research agenda that connects across the disciplines and highlights key areas that would benefit from further inquiry.

Governments play important roles as focal organizations in many interorganizational networks. However, the government perspective has largely been overlooked in the literature on supply networks, including research on humanitarian operations and logistics. So far, little attention has been devoted to how government agencies and other actors interact within complex networks. In this study, we use a qualitative research approach to study interorganizational interaction in the context of a major U.S. disaster: Hurricane Sandy.Specifically, we investigate the relatively successful Sandy response effort conducted by the New Jersey state government in interaction with other humanitarian actors. We find that the government took three main roles in interacting with other actors within the disaster response network: organizer, facilitator, and supply network member. Moreover, we develop a grounded model that provides a theoretical explanation of the interaction process and highlights the practices used by the government during the response stage. In addition to contributing to the humanitarian research domain, our study advances the emerging discourse on networks whose focal actors are not for-profit firms.

Modern slavery is used to describe forms of coercive labor exploitation that affect more than 40 million persons globally. Such practices are difficult to identify given they exist in the informal economy, and involve vulnerable individuals. Addressing modern slavery by organizations requires awareness of its context and complexities. While corporations have increasingly sought to manage modern slavery risk in their supply chains, their understanding of what modern slavery is and what should be managed remains limited. We argue a key problem with firms’ efforts to manage modern slavery risk is that it is a psychologically distant concept for them. We apply construal level theory to explore how organizations’ psychological distance from modern slavery risk affects their management of risk. We interviewed purchasing executives at 41 global organizations in Australia, Finland, and the U.S and identified four approaches to managing modern slavery risk at different levels of psychological distance. We also identified that conflicts between organizations' approaches to risk and what they identify in their operating environment, precedes important construal shifts that help to improve organizational understanding of labor‐related risk. We highlight ways that organizations' understanding of modern slavery risk plays a role in their governance of such risk in supply chains.

This paper focuses on the silent conversations by individual change makers reflecting upon their concerns in relation to their social and natural worlds. We investigate the internal and external deliberations that informants have by using a qualitative theory building approach in the empirical context of a biodiversity protection issue field in Finland. We conduct 27 interviews with individual change makers representing three types of organizations: government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and businesses. We seek to understand how change makers advancing biodiversity protection reflexively manage the uncertainty and equivocality they face in the interstitial issue field in the course of their change efforts. Our results show that change makers engage in three iterative actions around the issue of biodiversity: filtering, modeling, and translating. They therefore find nuanced ways to convey the biodiversity issue to their stakeholders and, in this way, promote the engagement of other organizational and individual actors in its protection.

The United States National Preparedness System has evolved significantly in the recent past. These changes have affected the system structures and goals for disaster response. At the same time, actors such as private businesses have become increasingly involved in disaster efforts. In this paper, we begin to fill the gap in the cross-sector literature regarding interactions that have systemic impacts by investigating how the simultaneous processes of systemic change and intensifying cross-sector interaction worked and interacted in the context of the preparedness system. We examine these inter-linkages through a qualitative study in the setting of Hurricane Sandy. Drawing from systems theory, we develop a grounded model that provides an explanation for the system change and highlights how cross-sector interaction relates to the changes observed in the system.