An Integrated Approach For Social Sustainable Supplier Evaluation And Selection

Organizational and managerial decisions are becoming influenced corporate sustainability pressures.Organizations need to consider economic,environmental and social dimensions of sustainability in their decisions if their goal is to become sustainable.Supply chain decisions play a distinct and critical role in overall sustainability of organizational good and service outputs.Although the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability have been examined by many scholars and practitioners,thus far,the social dimension has been received less attention in literature and in practice,in particular in developing countries and emerging economies.Social sustainability enables other sustainability initiatives and neglecting this dimension can have serious negative impacts across the supply chains.To address this issue,this dissertation proposes a framework for investigating the social sustainability of supply chains in manufacturing companies.To show the applicability and efficiency of the proposed framework,a sample of 38 experts was used to evaluate and prioritize social sustainability criteria,using a new multi-criteria decision-making method called the 'best worst method'(B WM).The criteria are ranked according to their average weight obtained through BWM.The respondents view 'contractual stakeholders influence' as the most important social sustainability criterion.One such important initiative and decision that can promote sustainability in supply chains of organizations is sustainable supplier selection.Sustainable supplier selection can greatly influence the sustainability of supply chains.Within this context,the social sustainability dimension has received relatively minor investigation;with the emphasis typically on economic and environmental sustainability.A grey-based multi-criteria decision-support tool composed of the 'best-worst method'(BWM)and TODIM is introduced.A grey-BWM approach is initially applied to determine social sustainability criteria weights,and then,a grey-TODIM method is utilized to rank suppliers for selection.A case study of a manufacturing company is presented to evaluate the applicability and efficiency of the method.Developing a framework for investigating social sustainability within the manufacturing sector context,proposing a multi-criteria decision-making method to evaluate the social sustainability and proposing a novel decision support approach to deal with the social sustainable supplier selection problem are the innovative points of this dissertation.The results from this research help industry managers,decision-makers and practitioners decide where to focus their attention during the implementation stage,to increase the social sustainability in their organizational supply chains and move towards sustainable development.