The ‘Hidden Side’ of Sustainability in Supply Chains

This chapter offers a literature review on tensions and paradoxes in pursuing corporate sustainability and in supply chain management, situating the book in the scientific debate, which involves two differing perspectives (Gao and Bansal, Journal of Business Ethics 112:241–255, 2013): (a) The instrumental logic of sustainability, according to which, economic reasons push firms to pursue social and environmental practices. (b) The integrative logic of sustainability, according to which all three pillars are equally and simultaneously important, recognizing that tensions are inevitable. Pursuing sustainability inevitably involves tension at different levels, ignoring or eliminating which (as the instrumental logic does) can impede real-world progress towards sustainability (Haffar and Searcy, Long Range Planning 52, 2019). In line with the instrumental logic and shifting the analysis from the corporate level to the supply chain level, a recent stream of research has questioned current sustainable practices to illuminate the ‘dark side’ (Glover, International Journal of Operations & Production Management 40:1801–1827, 2020) and the ‘hidden side’ (Matos et al., International Journal of Operations & Production Management 40:1749–1770, 2020) of sustainable supply chains, also adopting the paradox lens. A concise overview of the studies about sustainability paradoxes in supply chains is presented.