A Footprint Perspective for Sustainable Supply Chain Management Research

ABSTRACT

Supply chain management research predominantly examines sustainability from the perspective of buying firms, analyzing how procurement strategies, supplier governance, and compliance mechanisms can reduce negative environmental and social outcomes associated with their supply chains. While this approach has advanced our understanding of firm‐level practices, it suffers from a fundamental unit‐of‐analysis problem: Socio‐ecological footprints emerge from the interaction of multiple supply chains and other actors within specific localities, yet research often treats the supply chains of individual buying firms as independent units. Consequently, interventions that appear successful for individual firms may leave harm in place or merely displace it rather than resolve underlying causes. We introduce the footprint perspective as a complementary approach to sustainable supply chain management research. While the buying firm perspective usually traces supply chains from the buying firm to its suppliers, the footprint perspective begins its investigation in the localities where supply chain activities are entangled with socio‐ecological systems. This perspective treats localities as the unit of analysis, examining how interdependencies among supply chains, locality actors, and ecosystems jointly produce socio‐ecological footprints. We compare the assumptions of these two perspectives and outline an empirical playbook for putting this conceptual shift into practice.