Sustainable Purchasing and Supply Chain Management: The Entrepreneurial Role of the Purchasing Function

Abstract

Strengthening functional effectiveness and raising awareness of purchasing’s aggregate value-added to the firm's sustainability agenda, calls for expanding sensitivity and receptiveness to the challenges it faces. This presupposes reconsidering the function's relationships within the company and establishing its position on the interface of strategy and operations. However, and while prior research has underlined the growing importance of purchasing, little is known how the purchasing function can be recognised as an equal partner and what the necessary capabilities are. Heeding the calls of both academics and practitioners for increasing understanding on purchasing successfully tackling sustainable supply chain challenges, the paper adopts a theory building approach to provide clarity with respect to various aspects of the concept of sustainable purchasing and deliver transferrable insight into the implementation process of integrating sustainability concerns into purchasing practices. To this end, we build on prior work within the Dynamic Capabilities field of strategic management to utilise this theory as the main supportive pillar of our research, in effect moving closer to the view of purchasing managers as entrepreneurs. Hence, the novel framework that the study presents constitutes the basis for discussing both why and how the purchasing function should become involved in sustainable supply chain management, thus lending credence to voices concerned over substantiating the function's indispensable role in the sustainability era. The paper’s conclusion delves into the nature and interrelationship of purchasing managers’ capabilities. This is explicated by justifying how they could disembark from a pure transactional approach and actively participate in the identification of challenges as well as opportunities and subsequently develop appropriate responses to accommodate more sustainable supply chains. The verdict of viewing purchasing managers as business pioneers is further elaborated and coupled with the theoretical contributions, managerial implications and potential avenues for future research. Overall, the paper lends credence to the argument that reaping benefits through sustainability assumes purchasing’s strategic alignment through certain interactions.