Investigating the transfer of academic perceptions of sustainable supply chains into practice

Sustainability is often discussed in academic literature. Recently, this topic has had an increased representation within the research area of supply chain management. The concepts within this term are sustainability and Supply Chain Management (SCM) – both well defined and researched from multi-disciplinary perspectives. In general there is agreement within the academic world regarding the triple bottom line (Elkington, 1998) of sustainability with some additional but less important characteristics. In this research a systematic literature review was conducted to get an academic perspective of sustainable supply chain management. To compare this against the industrial perspective, an explorative questionnaire was deployed to supply chain managers and sustainability managers in the UK. The most important findings are perception gaps regarding the characteristics of SSCM as determined from an academic perspective and the status of implementation in practice along with perceptions regarding the triple bottom line. Further a discrepancy was found in the perspectives of supply chain managers and sustainability managers who were surveyed.