Sustainable practices in operations help manage resources efficiently without wasting them and reduce costs, increasing profits. The adoption of sustainable practices helps companies to improve their image and good will. There is a gap in research that investigates the economic aspects of sustainability, both from the perspective of the company and the supply chain. Given the growth, importance and generalization of OM's sustainability concerns, a special issue focusing on these efforts should be published a long time ago.
Since 2001, articles focusing on internal operations have analyzed human factors, environmental production, environmental management systems (EMS) and their effect on environmental, financial and TBL performance. Research has tended to investigate sustainable food management from the perspective of a specific company, and research has often been carried out in the context of large manufacturing companies in the private sector. The number of studies that incorporate the TBL of sustainability in this special issue is particularly welcome. More recently, studies have sought to investigate social, economic and environmental issues in a combined way, allowing us to examine the TBL of sustainability.
Table I also shows that the IJPM has published a similar number of articles on internal and inter-company sustainability. Milton Friedman (1970) argued that business is business, and that the main concern of organizations should be profits, not issues of corporate social responsibility and sustainability. In The Impact of Supply Chain Environmental Sustainability Programs on Shareholder Equity, Lammertjan Dam and Boyana Petkova studied environmental sustainability programs in the supply chain and studied how stock prices fluctuate when a company announces its commitment to such a program. Over the past 20 years, the pioneers of sustainable manufacturing have made significant contributions to this field.
Based on the degree of deviation from their ideal type, it was found that companies lacked internal capabilities to benefit from sustainable collaboration with suppliers and customers and improve business performance. Increasingly, organizations are interested in managing corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability as part of their operations management (OM). To achieve true corporate sustainability, an organization must recognize, value and promote the capacity of its people. In parallel, this environmental research has been complemented by a broader and deeper examination of social and humanitarian issues in operations.
While environmental research remains strong, there are more studies exploring issues of social sustainability and the TBL of sustainability.
