Reactive and proactive pathways to sustainable apparel supply chains: Manufacturer's perspective on stakeholder salience and organizational learning toward responsible management

This research explores stakeholder salience and sustainability learning efforts of apparel manufacturers operating in an emerging economy. An organizational view of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is conceptualized to delineate mechanisms that facilitate the implementation of supply chain sustainability. Data is collected from survey responses from 156 apparel manufacturers operating in India. Findings suggest that stakeholder salience in pressuring apparel manufacturers to embrace SSCM practices generates reactive pathways to sustainability implementation at the firm-level. Results also show that firm-intrinsic efforts of organizational members aiming to learn about sustainability shape proactive pathways toward SSCM. Our paper shows evidences that reactive pathways appear to be less effective than proactive ones. This paper contributes to the literature by detailing how different SSCM practices adopted by apparel manufacturing contribute to enhanced supply chain environmental and operational performances of contemporary apparel supply chains. It also enriches the firm-intrinsic view of stakeholder salience in SSCM by outlining the relevance of internal and external stakeholders in pressurizing manufacturing firms within the supply chain. Lastly, it strengthens the view of intra-firm learning toward sustainability in SSCM by drawing from the construct of ‘responsible management learning’ to propose an integrative notion of organizational learning toward responsible management (OLRM).