Antecedents and Enablers of Green Supply Chain Practices

The thesis titled antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices focuses on one of the most contemporary issues in supply chain management. The literature review explores the existing literature and research work on green supply chain practices and develops a framework for the research. The research is qualitative in nature and data was collected from the three automobile component-manufacturing companies in India. Semi structured interviews were conducted over a period of 18 months. There were three objectives for this thesis: 1. Describing the current state of green supply chain practices? 2. What are the antecedents and enablers for green supply chain practices? 3. What are the underlying mechanisms, if any? The research work concludes by answering all the above three questions and also gives the future direction for research. The research work started by finding a gap for the empirical research in the context of green supply chain practices. The objective of the research was to focus on antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices. Some contextual factors, inhibitors and consequences are also emerged during the pilot case study. The research work is rigor and to ensure the rigor of the research design, five-stage process was used to structure the methodology. As a final check author assessed his research against the four basic tests commonly used in empirical research; construct validity, internal validity, external validity and reliability. The research study has contributed both to the development and testing of theory relating to the antecedents and enablers of green supply chain practices. The review of literature provided a synthesis of the underpinning bodies of literature that has not previously been conducted in this way. This resulted in the identification of ten core green supply chain practices for the development of antecedents and enablers that created the foundation for author’s empirical investigation. It was found that previous studies have been largely theoretical. The empirical studies that do exist have focused on one particular dyadic relationship with in green supply chain practices. A double contribution has been made to testing the theory of green supply chain practices from a process and output perspective. As process perspective, a contribution has been made to methodology by developing a robust approach for conducting supply chain research beyond the dyad. From output perspective, the author has the empirical results from the three individual case studies and their cross-case comparison for dissemination to an academic audience. Specific contribution of this research to theory development include: 1. Development of macro model of green supply chain practices with the inputs from literature. 2. The synthesis of ten core green supply chain practices with antecedents and enablers from existing body of literature enriched through empirical testing 3. Empirical derivation of three contextual factors. Although the research work is new and contribute to the theory and practices, there are still some limitations of this research. Two minor limitations have been identified: 1. Generalizability of result to practice to practice: Due to the limited size of the case study approach, the results can only be generalized to theory and not to practice. 2. Variation in quality of information: The scope of data collection for all three case studies was same still the quality of information gathered was different. As good quality cross-case analysis was still possible but the relative strengths of the three cases varied. Overall the research work is original, rigor, and contributes to the existing theory and also paves the path for future research work in the area of green supply chain practices.