In light of the growing complexity of globally dispersed, multi-tier supply chains, the involvement of first-tier suppliers has become instrumental in the quest for achieving sustainability compliance along the supply chain. We describe this new responsibility as the double agency role. We employ agency and institutional theory arguments to explore the conditions under which first-tier suppliers will act as agents who fulfill the lead firm's sustainability requirements (i.e., the primary agency role) and implement these requirements in their suppliers' operations (i.e., the secondary agency role). The findings from three in-depth case studies embedded in different institutional contexts highlight the importance for lead firms to incentivize each agency role separately and to reduce information asymmetries, particularly at the second-tier level. In addition, our inductive analysis reveals several contingency factors that influence the coupling of the secondary agency role of the first-tier supplier. These factors include resource availability at the first-tier supplier's firm, the lead firm's focus on the triple-bottomline dimension (i.e., environmental or social), the lead firm's use of power, and the lead firm's internal alignment of the sustainability and purchasing function. We integrate our findings in a conceptual framework that advances the research agenda on multi-tier sustainable supply chains, and we subsequently outline the practical implications of assigning the double agency role to first tier suppliers.

This manuscript describes the experience from registration until randomisation for a cohort of 2260 patients with osteosarcoma who joined the EURAMOS-1 trial. This includes pre-operative chemotherapy and surgery. It sets out the practical issues in collaboration and in achieving randomisation.

Buying firms must pay increased attention to supply chain sustainability issues as they might be held responsible by stakeholders for non-sustainable supply chain activities. Frequently, sustainability problems occur upstream at the sub-supplier level. Building on the literature on multi-tier supply chains (MSCs), we investigated the strategies of buying firms in the food, apparel, packaging, and consumer electronics industries to manage the sustainability of second-tier suppliers and beyond. In particular, we analyzed seven cases of global MSCs and found four different characteristic MSC types-open, closed, third party, and "don't bother".We identified three main factors-supply chain complexity, the sustainability management capabilities of the first tier supplier, and the type of sustainability in focus (i.e., environmental or social sustainability)-that determine when and how buying firms actually extend their sustainability strategies to their sub-suppliers.

A growing research stream has expanded the level of analysis beyond single buyer–supplier relations to the network, including supplier–supplier relations. These supplier–supplier relations may constitute a missing link between the traditional analysis of the dyadic and the network level of analysis that are often treated separately. This paper explores the interplay of the supplier–supplier and network of analysis by focusing on the inherent tension between cooperation and competition, using a multiple case study design in the Japanese and German automobile industries. It is argued that the buyer is able to exert influence not only on the coopetition level, so within “horizontal supply chain relations,” but that the coopetitive tension in the overall network can in fact be managed through the active establishment and maintenance of such relations.

An instrumental perspective still dominates research on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). As an alternative, this study presents a paradox perspective and argues that sustainability and other business aims are not always compatible, particularly in an emerging market context. Often, paradoxical tensions originate in conflicts between the socioeconomic environment of emerging market suppliers and their Western customers’ demands for both cost competitiveness and sustainability. We argue that Western buying firms can play a key role in moderating such tensions, as experienced by emerging market suppliers. Specifically, we explore how purchasing and sustainability managers within buying firms make sense of and respond to paradoxical tensions in SSCM. We conduct an in‐depth case study of a Western multinational company that sources substantially from Chinese suppliers. While we found strong evidence for a persisting instrumental perspective in the sensemaking and practices of purchasing and sustainability managers, we also observed an alternative response, primarily by sustainability managers that we labeled as “contextualizing.” Contextualizing can alleviate the tensions otherwise present in SSCM by making sustainability standards more workable in an emerging market context, and it can help individual managers to move toward paradoxical sensemaking. We outline the value of paradoxical sensemaking in bringing about changes toward “true sustainability” in SSCM.