Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Production Planning & Control on 24 Jan 2020, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09537287.2020.1717661
Accepted author manuscript, 693 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Sustainable Procurement
T2 - Comparing In-House and Outsourcing Implementation Modes
AU - Sayed, Maysara
AU - Hendry, Linda
AU - Bell, Marta
PY - 2021/1/25
Y1 - 2021/1/25
N2 - Sustainable supply chain management practices can be particularly difficult to implement when the responsibility for sustainable procurement (SP) rests with buyers employed by a contractor, rather than an in-house procurement team. Yet there is no extant research that investigates the effect of outsourcing on SP. To address this research gap, this paper uses multi-case study data to explore the impact of outsourcing versus in-house implementation modes in the pursuit of SP. The findings suggest that each implementation mode has distinctive challenges and facilitators. However, by considering Transaction Cost Economics, results reveal that the advantage of outsourcing to professionals, with well-established SP expertise, brings information asymmetries in developing initial outsourcing contracts, which can lead to poorer sustainability performance than initially expected. Furthermore, when applying Principal Agency Theory, results suggest that sustainable performance can be improved in the long term through the effective design of well-constructed contractual relationships as SP maturity increases.
AB - Sustainable supply chain management practices can be particularly difficult to implement when the responsibility for sustainable procurement (SP) rests with buyers employed by a contractor, rather than an in-house procurement team. Yet there is no extant research that investigates the effect of outsourcing on SP. To address this research gap, this paper uses multi-case study data to explore the impact of outsourcing versus in-house implementation modes in the pursuit of SP. The findings suggest that each implementation mode has distinctive challenges and facilitators. However, by considering Transaction Cost Economics, results reveal that the advantage of outsourcing to professionals, with well-established SP expertise, brings information asymmetries in developing initial outsourcing contracts, which can lead to poorer sustainability performance than initially expected. Furthermore, when applying Principal Agency Theory, results suggest that sustainable performance can be improved in the long term through the effective design of well-constructed contractual relationships as SP maturity increases.
KW - Sustainability
KW - procurement
KW - Outsourcing
KW - Higher Education
KW - Food & Catering
U2 - 10.1080/09537287.2020.1717661
DO - 10.1080/09537287.2020.1717661
M3 - Journal article
VL - 32
SP - 145
EP - 168
JO - Production Planning and Control
JF - Production Planning and Control
SN - 0953-7287
IS - 2
ER -