Migration to the quadruple bottom line framework for achieving sustainable development goals: the 4Ps of sustainability

The topic of sustainability has been of great interest for the past decades. Many governments have taken action to incentivize firms to reduce negative environmental and social impacts. It is unclear, however, how successful policymakers have been in reducing sustainability threats. This obscurity raises the question of how they can play a fundamental role in helping businesses become more sustainable while complying with entrepreneurs’ and investors’ expectations. This study reviews recent academic directions and projects centered on the convergence of supply chain management and sustainability development. To this end, this research adopts an operations management perspective to study the existing sustainable supply chain management literature. This study provides a novel taxonomy of the literature, comprising nine primary research directions, and offers promising future research. We analyze how each research direction aligns with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals to identify extensively explored areas and pinpoint those requiring further attention. Based on this literature review, we primarily present evidence corroborating a worldwide trend toward implementing sustainability-driven regulations. This finding helps us develop a new theory in the context of sustainability development and introduce the quadruple bottom line framework as an extension of the classical triple bottom line model.