IT-Enabled Capabilities for Sustainable Supply Chain Management: An Affordance Theory Perspective

There is an increasing consumer pressure to improve the environmental and social impacts of supply chain activities, forcing organisations to adopt sustainable supply chain practices. However, the management of sustainable supply chain is complex because it is inter-organisational in nature involving different and sometimes conflicting objectives and priorities among various stakeholders. Successful implementation of sustainable supply chain practices requires a set of specific organisational capabilities. Currently, very little is known about what capabilities are required and how information technology (IT) can enable those capabilities. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by identifying a set of possible IT-enabled capabilities based on Affordance Theory. We put forward a novel approach that demonstrates how Affordance Theory could be applied to discover the roles of IT in capability development to support the successful implementation of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM).

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