Competitive Green Supply Chain Transformation with Dynamic Capabilities—An Exploratory Case Study of Chinese Electronics Industry

Ying Ye and Kwok Hung Lau
Additional contact information
Ying Ye: Department of Management Science, School of Politics and Public Administration, Soochow University, Suzhou 215006, China
Kwok Hung Lau: School of Accounting, Information Systems and Supply Chain, College of Business and Law, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 14, 1-23

Abstract: Extant studies identify different strategic approaches for businesses to integrate environment management (EM) into corporate supply chain management (SCM) to create different competitive market advantages. With increasing market uncertainties, stakeholder complexities, constraints of resources, companies nowadays are required to develop more context-specific solutions for mitigating sustainability risk and improving market performance in supply chain sustainability practices. To address the challenges faced by businesses, this study aims to explore how a company adapts green supply chain strategies for a competitive transformation. Specifically, we aim to identify different green supply chain capabilities that form hybrid choices of green solutions for a company to leverage an adaptive green shift. Through an extensive literature review, this study proposes a conceptual framework for exploration which is based on a qualitative in-depth case study in the electronics industry—one of the most polluting manufacturing sectors in China. The findings show that supply chain characteristics play a significant role in the selection of different green SCM solutions by businesses. We find different hybrid choices of strategic decisions are being made by the case company operating with high-volume and high-value supply chains respectively. High-volume supply chains adopt both operational pollution and waste control strategies and incremental green product strategies to balance cost of operational change and develop a competitive eco-efficient market expansion. In contrast, high-value supply chains adopt radical green product innovation strategies and operational waste prevention strategies to balance cost of product innovation and build operational efficiency to expand in a competitive eco-differentiation market. A mix of dynamic capabilities involved in different supply chain green transformations are also identified.

Keywords: green supply chain strategy; green operation and relationship capability; lean and green; incremental and radical green product innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/14/8640/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/14/8640/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:14:y:2022:i:14:p:8640-:d:862768

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().