Social Sustainability in Apparel Supply Chains—The Role of the Sourcing Intermediary in a Developing Country

Abstract

After considering significant literature on sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), it is evident that research has neglected the social dimension and still lacks in highlighting the role of sourcing intermediaries in supply chains. The apparel supply chain has increased enormously in length and complexity, driving apparel retailers to employ sourcing intermediaries who manage their sourcing activities with suppliers from developing countries overseas. Thus, the purpose of this study is to enrich existing findings on SSCM by exploring the management of social sustainability when sourcing intermediaries are in between the focal company and the respective developing country factories. More specifically, this study aims to understand the role of apparel sourcing intermediaries for the implementation of social management strategies based on the perception of multiple supply chain actors. Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews conducted in Vietnam and Europe. Ultimately ten propositions are presented, all explicitly concentrating on the apparel intermediary's role as a significant enabler for social sustainability in apparel supply chains. The roles are social sustainability, supplier developer and coordinator, gatekeeper and safeguard, cultural broker, and social risk manager. The social sustainability roles assumed by the apparel sourcing intermediary offer great opportunities to both apparel retailers and developing country factories.

Social Sustainability in Fashion Supply Chains—Understanding Social Standard Implementation Failures in Vietnam and Indonesia Using Agency Theory

“…Nevertheless, the cases explicitly mentioned that sourcing agents cannot be monitored by western retailers on an permanent basis due to the spatial distance and respective monitoring costs, leaving effective social standard implementation at risk. This finding confirms prior findings that spatial distance increases information asymmetries [38,51,57].…”

“…However, researchers criticize the fact that the buyer's perspective and their first-tier supplier relationship has been investigated predominantly, while there is little known about how (lower-tier) suppliers perceive the social compliance strategies of their buyers [27,28]. Moreover, the sourcing agent as an intermediary between the buyer and the first-tier supplier has been neglected widely in multi-tier supply chain research, although researchers found that a sourcing agent assumes high responsibility for managing and ensuring the implementation of required social standards further upstream in the supply chain [57].…”

“…The sourcing agent, as an intermediary in the apparel supply chain [59], is an agent to the retailer (principal) and a principal to the supplier (agent). Hence, when apparel retailers opt for a mediated sourcing strategy, the risk for social standard implementation is typically shifted to the sourcing agent [57]. This provides room for considerable agency problems and opportunistic behaviors performed by the sourcing agent, explained in the following [25,77].…”

Global Sourcing in Fast Fashion Retailers: Sourcing Locations and Sustainability Considerations

“…However, exploitation of resources across globally dispersed supply chains often resulted in many environmental and social issues [9]. The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory in 2013 in Bangladesh [10][11][12][13], which caused thousands of deaths, placed the fashion industry under increasing public scrutiny and fashion companies felt the urgency of bridging the gap between economic sustainability and social and environmental performance [14]. Consequently, they are now trying to make their manufacturing sourcing more sustainable by focusing on the triple bottom line (TBL) approach, which involves the economic, environmental, and social dimensions of sustainability [15][16][17][18][19].…”

Sustainability Benefits of RFID Technology in the Apparel Industry

“…The industry also generates high social risks related to inhumane working conditions where production is outsourced to lower labor cost countries in order for organizations to remain competitive. In general, the implementation of processes to improve the sustainability of a company in the apparel industry is challenging due to the financial pressures on management for lower cost and shorter lead time [13], as well as the above stated features of a global industry. Each industry has different benefits for using RFID specific to their business models.…”