Decision Reversals and Symbolic Practices Among Sustainable Suppliers The Case of Sustainable Food Supply Chains

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the decision reversal among sustainable suppliers in the context of sustainable food supply chains. In chapter 1, unlike previous studies that explore sustainability from a compliance approach, we deal with a hitherto unexplored but serious issue of decision reversals among small and medium sized sustainable suppliers in the lower tiers of the supply chain. Decision reversal among suppliers who discontinue adopting sustainable practices, have their associated environmental and social costs apart from economic costs. Drawing insights from group model building with participation from different stakeholders in a sustainable food supply chain from regulators, different tiers of suppliers to consumers and supported by theory, we isolated the behavioral factors that lead to decision reversal. We test the effect of these factors using vignette based experiments conducted among sustainable food suppliers in South India. We found that myopic loss aversion and reference thinking helps explain decision reversal among small and medium sustainable suppliers. The implications of our findings on theory as well as on practice are offered.In Chapter 2, we examine the factors that lead to substantive and symbolic practices by lower-tier sustainable suppliers in the context of food supply chain. Buying firms adopt various governance mechanisms to ensure sustainability compliance among upstream suppliers. While, certification is the most popular governance mechanism used worldwide, mounting evidence indicates that there is an incongruity in sustainability efforts between what is declared by supplier firms and their actual practices. Our empirical analysis of sustainable cocoa suppliers in Kerala (a state in South India) indicate that behavioural characteristics of suppliers, specifically their attitude towards risk and ambiguity can be used to assess suppliers tendency to adopt symbolic versus substantive sustainability postures.