چشم‌انداز نظریه‌ی نهادی درباره‌ی روش‌های پایدار در زنجیره تامین لبنیات

The need for sustainable practices in the food supply chain, particularly in the area of energy reduction, is becoming acute. The food industry currently has to contend with multiple competing pressures alongside the new challenges of sustainable production. We applied Institutional Theory to explore the role of supermarkets in the development of legitimate sustainable practices across the dairy supply chains. The paper focuses on dairy supply chain organizations and their consumption of energy. We conducted 70 semi-structured telephone interviews with various stakeholders across the supply chain. Findings revealed that the majority of actors in the supply chain identified supermarkets as the dominant player, and that the supermarkets exert pressure on other smaller organizations across the supply chain. Although some organizations wished to pursue a sustainable agenda through integrating new rules and legitimate practices within their own organization, the dominant logic appeared to be one of cost reduction and profit maximization. There was also evidence that supermarkets and other large organizations attempt to replicate publicly available information on green successes for image purposes. We conclude that the dominant logic of cost reduction is so well established that challenging the dominant logic may prove difficult. The challenge is therefore to complement the dominant logic with sustainable practices across the whole supply chain, a role Government needs to play. This will require a broader more systemic approach to encouraging sustainable practices including investment and financing practices, so that all members of the dairy supply chain can co-operate and contribute to energy reduction.

The need for sustainable practices in the food supply chain is becoming acute (Dairy Road Map, 2008). The food industry currently has to contend with multiple competing pressures alongside the new challenges of sustainable production, in particular reducing energy consumption (Boiral, 2006). The food industry has changed a great deal since the 1940s with increases in purchasing power, the introduction of packaging, and extensive mechanization and development of factory processes. It could be argued that such developments have also increased the food industry's dependency on energy at the industrial manufacturing stage. In this context, sustainable practices have become more important in achieving the cost effective production and distribution of goods. The food industry has to contend with multiple pressures alongside the new challenges of sustainable production and the challenges faced in relation to energy consumption touch on multiple sectors in addition to food and energy production, and include construction (e.g. of storage facilities and retail environments) and manufacture (e.g., of agricultural equipment, refrigeration equipment). In the present study, we set out to explore what small and large organizations operating across one important food supply chain, namely the dairy supply chain which is an energy intensive supply chain (Dairy Road Map, 2008), are doing to implement sustainable energy practices. Specifically, this study explores how sustainable practices become legitimized in the dairy supply chain in the United Kingdom (UK). Suchman (1995, p. 574) provides a definition of legitimacy as “a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions”. Therefore, as stated by Greenwood and Suddaby (2005, p. 36–37) “legitimating an organizational form that does not fit a prevailing logic involves modifying or displacing that logic in order to establish new legitimacy criteria”. In this case that would be legitimating sustainable practices. We apply Institutional Theory which is an alternative theoretical lens to previous research that has focused on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), environmental management and so on (e.g. Bai and Sarkis, 2010, de Ron, 1998, Herron and Braiden, 2006, de Brito et al., 2008 and Wong et al., 2012). Applying such organizational theories to supply chain management is an area which is currently in its infancy (Ketchen and Hult, 2007); particularly where the focus of attention is on sustainability and greening supply chains (Etzion, 2007 and Sarkis et al., 2011). Previous research applying Institutional Theory has focused on organizations, whereas this study explores a supply chain comprising of multiple organizations. Institutional Theory has been used extensively in studies exploring environmental management in organzations (e.g. Hoffman, 1997, 1999; Delmas, 2002; Bansal, 2005). The strength of Institutional Theory is that it offers explanations of why certain practices are chosen without an obvious economic return (Berrone et al., 2010; Meyer and Rowan, 1977 and DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). We explore what stakeholders across the diary supply chain are doing in order to increase energy efficiency, whether they have future plans to do more in terms of energy efficiency and reduction, and to discover if outsiders to organizations know about these practices i.e. are their practices visible or invisible beyond the firm boundary. We also explore the key factors preventing the development of sustainable strategies, in this case strategies to reduce energy consumption. The present study contributes to the literature on sustainable strategies, particularly in relation to environmental concerns and using Institutional Theory allows us to explore the factors that affect different actors across a supply chain and could help to identify where collaborative change in practices could be encouraged.