Supplier sustainability development in emerging countries

Friday, April 21, 2023, 12:00 – 13:00 CET

On April 21, 2023, we hosted our lunch webinar on Supplier sustainability development in emerging countries. Chengyong Xiao explained his work and research on the interaction between public and buyer-driven governance in shaping supplier sustainability.

Growing evidence shows that governmental and regulatory agencies in emerging countries play an increasingly active role in enforcing labour and environmental protection laws. Against this backdrop, we conducted a longitudinal case study of nine Chinese suppliers of COSMOS in the consumer electronics industry to explore how growing public governance interacts with buyer-driven governance in shaping supplier sustainability capability development in emerging countries. We identified four different mechanisms through which public governance and buyer-driven governance jointly influence the supplier’s willingness and ability to transition from first-order to second-order sustainability learning. These four mechanisms are of substantially different natures, ranging from complementary, synergistic, and substitutive to even overshadowing. As such, our findings provide a nuanced picture of the interactions between public governance and buyer-driven governance for supplier sustainability development in emerging countries. Moreover, our findings provide in-depth insights into the trajectories through which suppliers can improve sustainability performance in institutional environments characterized by different configurations of public and buyer-driven governance.

Chengyong Xiao

Chengyong Xiao is assistant professor of supply chain management at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He hold a bachelor’s degree in management science from the University of Science and Technology of China (2010), and a PhD degree in operations management from the University of Groningen (2019).

He is a researcher in the field of sustainable supply chain management, with a focus on the extension of sustainability standards along global supply chains, particularly on social and environmental sustainability of emerging-country suppliers. He has conducted qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-method studies, and his research has appeared in premier academic outlets, such as the Journal of Operations Management, the Journal of Supply Chain Management, Ecological Economics, Supply Chain Management: an international journal, and the International Journal of Production Economics.

Furthermore, his research aims to develop an in-depth understanding of the challenges in extending sustainability standards along global supply chains, and, more importantly, to identify effective drivers and strategies that can improve suppliers’ social and environmental sustainability management capabilities.