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Cooperation, coordination, or collaboration? A structured review of buyers’ partnerships to support sustainable sourcing in supply chains

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Abstract

The growing need of today’s global supply chains for a paradigm shift to sustainability requires all supply chain members to establish partnership relationships. However, the existing literature fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of these partnerships. The present research contributes to understanding the nature and structure of the buyers’ partnerships for enhancing sustainable sourcing. A structured review methodology is adopted to collect information about supply chain partnerships from the literature on sustainable sourcing. Then, a content analysis is conducted on the collected information using a comprehensive partnership framework, i.e., the McNamara framework. The framework suggests ten interconnected facets to characterize the structure of a partnership and classifies the nature of partnerships into three categories called cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. The findings indicate that cooperative partnerships are not effective for promoting sustainable sourcing as they lack the exchange of resources between the participating organizations. In contrast, coordinative partnerships are mainly effective for tactical and operational initiatives to address reactive, end-of-pipe solutions for sustainable sourcing. Finally, collaborative partnerships should be mainly initiated at the strategic level to design proactive solutions for sustainable sourcing. Some practical implications are provided to facilitate the transition of supply chains to sustainability. Some open questions for future research are also provided.

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Notes

  1. Except Ji et al. (2015), there are some other articles in Table 7 in which different facets represent different partnership approaches. For these articles, the approach is mentioned in a parenthesis. However, in contrast to Ji et al. (2015) that studied only one partnership mechanism, the other articles studied different partnership mechanisms, and the facets can be used consistently to distinguish between them.

Abbreviations

OD:

Organizational design

FA:

Formality of the agreement

APO:

Autonomy of the participating organizations

KP:

Key personnel

IS:

Information sharing

DM:

Decision-making

CR:

Conflict resolution

RA:

Resource allocation

ST:

Systems thinking

TR:

Trust

C1:

Cooperation

C2:

Coordination

C3:

Collaboration

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the editors and reviewers for their valuable comments and the opportunity to revise the article. The authors also greatly thank Dr. Donna Sedgwick, the faculty member of Department of Sociology at the Virginia Tech, for her useful feedback and suggestions. The final version of the manuscript is the sole responsibility of the authors, and not of anyone being thanked.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government, Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT), with No. NRF-2022R1A2C1092077, and, also, by the NRF grant funded by the Korea government through MSIT under the Brain Pool program with No. NRF-2021H1D3A2A01082266. The Institute of Engineering Research (IOER) and the Institute of Computer Technology (ICT) at Seoul National University provided research facilities for this study.

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Author notes

  1. Jörn Altmann

    Present address: Technology Management Economics and Policy Program, Graduate School of Engineering Practice, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, 84156-83111, Iran

    Hamid Zarei & Morteza Rasti-Barzoki

  2. Department of Transportation Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, Isfahan, 84156-83111, Iran

    Hamid Zarei

  3. Institute of Engineering Research, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea

    Morteza Rasti-Barzoki & Jörn Altmann

  4. Technology Management Economics and Policy Program, Graduate School of Engineering Practice, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea

    Morteza Rasti-Barzoki

  5. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea

    Bernhard Egger

  6. Integrated Major in Smart City Global Convergence, Seoul National University, Seoul, 08826, South Korea

    Jörn Altmann

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Contributions

Hamid Zarei: conceptualization, formal analysis, investigation, methodology, validation, writing original draft, writing, review, and editing; Morteza Rasti-Barzoki: supervision, project administration, and visualization; Jörn Altmann: investigation, visualization, and validation; Bernhard Egger: investigation and visualization.

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Correspondence to Morteza Rasti-Barzoki.

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Zarei, H., Rasti-Barzoki, M., Altmann, J. et al. Cooperation, coordination, or collaboration? A structured review of buyers’ partnerships to support sustainable sourcing in supply chains. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 76491–76514 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-27541-w

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