EMERGING DISCOURSE INCUBATOR: The Roles of Institutional Complexity and Hybridity in Social Impact Supply Chain Management

Supply chain research and practice has moved beyond green or environmental issues to include social issues. But much of the focus still remains on attempts of large companies to reduce social harm along their supply chains rather than creating social good. At the same time, research investigating the role of NGOs in supply chains or humanitarian logistics often emphasizes temporary initiatives and overlooks long-term viability. This conceptual paper seeks to expand the playing field by looking at how social enterprises manage their supply chains to generate social benefit while maintaining or improving their financial viability in the long term. Our contribution is to consider those socially motivated organizations that lie on the continuum between purely social and purely commercial enterprises. We consider how these organizations manage their supply chains for social impact and define this area as social impact supply chain management (SISCM). In this work, we view these organizations and managerial issues through the lens of institutional complexity, that is, the presence of multiple and possibly conflicting institutional logics in the focal organization. We propose that, for these organizations, supply chain strategy, stakeholder identification and engagement, and relationship management might differentiate SISCM from traditional supply chain management. And as a result, we offer future research directions that might add clarity to effective SISCM.