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Supply chain sustainability
Supply chain sustainability

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4 The social perspective

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Figure 6 The social perspective on supply chain sustainability
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Figure 6 is composed of four quadrants representing the four perspective of supply chain sustainability. The upper-left quadrant is labelled ‘Environmental perspective (greening of supply chain)’ and includes production/delivery, transport, waste, and product/service life cycle. The upper-right quadrant is labelled ‘Financial perspective’ and includes efficiency, value, benchmarking and profit. The lower-left quadrant (highlighted) is labelled ‘Social perspective (ethics)’ and includes employee development, technology, employee conditions and communications. The lower-right quadrant is labelled ‘External stakeholder perspective (network)’ and includes local community, regulatory, suppliers/customers, and political.

Figure 6 The social perspective on supply chain sustainability

In this section, we will be looking at the social and ethical aspects of supply chain management, or at least at a selection of them. Rather than presenting you with a comprehensive list of all the issues that you may encounter in this area, we seek to develop your awareness of the type of social issues that may affect your supply chain performance. Specifically, we will discuss the impact of poor performance of organisations with regards to their own staff and suppliers, both direct (tier one) and indirect suppliers (tier two up to the nth tier). Let’s begin our discussion by looking at the subject of ethics.