Identification and prioritization of corporate sustainability practices using analytical hierarchy process

A systematic literature review on corporate sustainability: contributions, barriers, innovations and future possibilities

This paper aims to understand the current research scenario through published studies on corporate sustainability, emphasizing the environmental approach. Methodologically, this research develops a systematic literature review based on papers published in the Web of Science database in the last ten years. As a result, there was an upward evolution of research on the searched topic, with one hundred fifteen publications in the last three years compared to one hundred six documents published in the previous seven years. It is also observed that studies published at the beginning of the time frame between 2011 and 2020 were more concerned with the adoption of corporate sustainability, while the most recent research focuses on new approaches and methodologies for its implementation. And, with regard to its implementation, one of the main barriers is the incorrect perception of senior managers that the results from corporate sustainability must be more linked to the economic than to the environmental and social spheres. As relevant aspects, this study observed that new technologies, currently led by the 5th generation mobile network (5G) and Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), can contribute to the insertion of corporate sustainability in the industrial context. It also noted that, despite being recent, COVID-19 was considered by several researchers as an event to be considered in terms of corporate sustainability.

Sustainable Circular Economy Strategies: An Analysis of Brazilian Corporate Sustainability Reporting

Corporate Sustainability Reporting provides essential data for academic and empirical research on sustainability and the still-growing adoption of the circular economy by companies. Despite the wide attention that the circular economy receives from the academy, a systematization and hierarchy of the strategies that embrace the sustainable circular economy are still necessary. In addition, there is a limitation of research on the analysis of Corporate Sustainability Reporting in emerging economies. In this study, fifty sustainable circular economy strategies emerged from a systematic literature review, arranged among nine categories. The differential of the identified strategies is the expansion of strategies for a sustainable circular economy vision. Then, 51 Corporate Sustainability Reporting from 17 multinational companies operating in Brazil in 2016, 2018 and 2020 were analyzed to identify companies’ adoption of these strategies. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting analysis results suggest that companies operating in Brazil are directing significant efforts toward a sustainable circular economy. Based on these two results and the theory of business process management, we proposed the Business Process for Sustainable Circular Economy framework.

Methodology for Prioritizing Best Practices Applied to the Sustainable Last Mile—The Case of a Brazilian Parcel Delivery Service Company

The ever-increasing impacts of the last mile delivery sector on the environment and the quality of life of the urban population, such as increased congestion, demand best practices to be incorporated by companies to reduce impacts such as emission of air pollutants and Greenhouse Gases (GHG) and depletion of natural resources, among others. However, a myriad of strategies has been developed for this purpose but there is a lack of methodologies that allow the choice of the best ones for a specific case. Therefore, this study looks for those best practices to be employed through an innovative methodology that consists of SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats), a map of strategies of the delivery service, and using the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard (SBSC) and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), with the differential of considering the peculiarities of each company. The results applied in a Brazilian last mile delivery service company show that best practices such as route optimization, implementation of new infrastructure and business models for urban deliveries, and use of information systems for fleet tracking and monitoring contribute significantly to improving performance indicators and achieving the sector’s goal to become more sustainable, and especially meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 8, 9, 11, and 17.

Bankruptcy Risk Prediction in Ensuring the Sustainable Operation of Agriculture Companies

In recent decades, predicting company bankruptcies and financial troubles has become a major concern for various stakeholders. Furthermore, because financially sustainable businesses are affected by numerous highly complex factors, both internal and external, the situation is even more complex. This paper applies Altman’s Z-score models; more precisely, the paper applies the initial Z-score model (a model for manufacturing companies), the Z′-score model (for companies operating in emerging markets), and the Z-score bankruptcy probability calculation. Therefore, this paper offers the results of the application of different Z-score models and the calculation of bankruptcy probability on a sample of agricultural companies listed on the Belgrade Stock Exchange in the period 2015–2019. In addition, different Z-score models are used for the same sample so that the difference between their results and application can be determined. In addition, the validity of the data published in the financial statements of the respective companies was confirmed using the Beneish M-score model with five and eight variables. The results obtained by applying Altman’s Z-score model (initial and adapted to emerging markets) indicate that a certain number of companies had impaired financial stability during the observed period, i.e., that they were in danger of bankruptcy. In addition, based on the results obtained using the Beneish M-score model, it was identified that a number of companies showed signals that indicate possible fraudulent financial reporting. Further, it was found that less than half of the observed companies reported on environmental protection in their annual reports, and they did so by providing a modest amount of information. The originality and value of the paper lies in suggesting that policymakers in the Serbian emerging markets should pay more attention to the operations of companies from the observed sector, as well as to their financial and non-financial reporting. Future research should focus on comparisons with agricultural companies from the same sector whose securities are listed on stock exchanges in the region.

Benchmarking framework for sustainable manufacturing based MCDM techniques

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model for sustainable manufacturing by adopting a combined approach using AHP, fuzzy TOPSIS and fuzzy EDAS methods. The proposed model aims to identify and prioritize the sustainable factors and technical requirements that help in improving the sustainability of manufacturing processes.

Design/methodology/approach

The proposed approach integrates both AHP, Fuzzy EDAS and Fuzzy TOPSIS. AHP method is used to generate the weights of the sustainable factors. Fuzzy EDAS and Fuzzy TOPSIS are applied to rank and determine the application priority of a set of improvement approaches. The ranks carried out from each MCDM approach is assessed by computing the spearman's correlation coefficient.

Findings

The results reveal the proposed model is efficient in sustainable factors and the technical requirements prioritizing. In addition, the results carried out from this study indicate the high efficiency of AHP, Fuzzy EDAS and Fuzzy TOPSIS in decision making. Besides, the results indicate that the model provides a useable methodology for managers' staff to select the desirable sustainable factors and technical requirements for sustainable manufacturing.

Research limitations/implications

The main limitation of this paper is that the proposed approach investigates an average number of factors and technical requirements.

Originality/value

This paper investigates an integrated MCDM approach for sustainable factors and technical requirements prioritization. In addition, the presented work pointed out that AHP, Fuzzy EDAS and Fuzzy TOPSIS approach can manipulate several conflict attributes in a sustainable manufacturing context.

Identifying Corporate Sustainability Issues by Analyzing Shareholder Resolutions: A Machine-Learning Text Analytics Approach

Corporations have embraced the idea of corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) under the general framework of sustainability. Studies have measured and analyzed the impact of internal sustainability efforts on the performance of individual companies, policies, and projects. This exploratory study attempts to extract useful insight from shareholder sustainability resolutions using machine learning-based text analytics. Prior research has studied corporate sustainability disclosures from public reports. By studying shareholder resolutions, we gain insight into the shareholders’ perspectives and objectives. The primary source for this study is the Ceres sustainability shareholder resolution database, with 1737 records spanning 2009–2019. The study utilizes a combination of text analytic approaches (i.e., word cloud, co-occurrence, row-similarities, clustering, classification, etc.) to extract insights. These are novel methods of transforming textual data into useful knowledge about corporate sustainability endeavors. This study demonstrates that stakeholders, such as shareholders, can influence corporate sustainability via resolutions. The incorporation of text analytic techniques offers insight to researchers who study vast collections of unstructured bodies of text, improving the understanding of shareholder resolutions and reaching a wider audience.

Rethinking the Way of Doing Business: A Reframe of Management Structures for Developing Corporate Sustainability

Corporate sustainability (CS) literature has gone through a period of intense development. The moment is favorable to gather these contributions to consistently advance the state-of-the-art in CS and, also, discuss them in application to real contexts. The main objective of the paper is to systematize, through a literature review using content analysis of the 30 most cited articles from 2007 to 2017, the guiding pillars of CS management. A systematic search for papers was carried out in Scopus and Web of Science, and the initial screening of the papers was assisted by the coding software, MAXQDA 2018, through which the authors structured and analyzed their main insights, contributions, and conclusions. After getting acquainted with the sample, an in-depth reading of the texts was conducted and 60 CS elements were identified. The elements cited in the relevant literature were grouped into six pillars related to corporate sustainability strategy, corporate governance, human resources management, knowledge and innovation management, measurement, disclosure, and independent assurance, and management systems, and integrated management systems. The main contribution of this paper is to identify the management pillars of CS in a systematic way to consistently advance the state-of-the-art in the subject. Also, this study provides understanding to managers on the main aspects that make up the integration of this construct in the companies.

Promoting a revamped CRM through Internet of Things and Big Data: an AHP-based evaluation

Purpose

Internet of things (IoT) and big data (BD) could change how the societies function. This paper explores the role of IoT and BD and their impact on customer relationship management (CRM) investments in modern customer service. The purpose of this paper is to develop an analytic hierarchy planning framework to establish criteria weights and to develop a general self-assessment model for determining the most important factors influencing the IoT and BD investment in CRM. The authors found that most studies have focused on conceptualizing the impact of IoT without BD and with limited empirical studies and analytical models. This paper sheds further light on the topic by presenting both IoT and BD aspects of future CRM.

Design/methodology/approach

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology is used to weight and prioritize the factors influencing the IoT and BD investment in modern CRM in the service industry. The AHP framework resulted in a ranking of 21 sustainability sub-factors based on evaluations by experienced information technology and customer service professionals.

Findings

The paper provides significant insight on the new frontier of CRM, focusing on the use of IoT and BD and the respective solutions to address them were identified. This study primarily contributes in providing the process of effectively managing and implementing IoT and BD in big businesses by identifying the connecting link between firms and customers.

Practical implications

The understanding of new frontier of CRM connective via IoT and BD can solve the dilemmas and challenges linked to the practice of implement IoT and BD in the information systems field. The study provides valuable information and critical analysis of IoT and BD with regard to the integration of CRM. Finally, this study further provides directions for future researchers.

Originality/value

IoT and BD are a growing phenomenon, which business decision-makers and information professionals need to consider seriously to properly ascertain the modern CRM dimensions in the digital economies. They also should embrace the proper CRM innovation, which is powered by IoT and BD, and discover how IoT and BD can bring the next level of maturity to CRM “CRM of everything.”

Presenting sustainable supply chain fuzzy rotation matrix framework to manage business challenges in the context of sustainable supply chain management

Purpose

The purpose of this paper seeks to provide a hybrid framework of sustainable supply chain fuzzy rotation matrix regarding the challenges in today’s business environment and the goals pursued by sustainable supply chain, to prioritize effective infrastructure to manage the challenges in ceramic tile industry in Yazd.

Design/methodology/approach

The research offers a hybrid framework of analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and quality function deployment (QFD) model to determine, which one of the goals of a sustainable supply chain can have a greater share in the management of business challenges.

Findings

The results indicated government regulations that encourage the implementation of sustainable supply chain and management of the consumption of non-renewable resources are among the most important infrastructures that can be effective to manage the challenges of today’s business.

Practical implications

Given the importance of managing the challenges in today’s business environment and sustainable supply chain management capabilities to enable managers to deal with these challenges, the present research makes effort to offer a hybrid framework of AHP and QFD model, to determine, which one of the goals of a sustainable supply chain can have a greater share in the management of business challenges.

Originality/value

By reviewing the existing research studies in the sustainable supply chain area, it can be found that despite of vast studies, there is no focus on establishing a comprehensive interaction between business challenges management and the fulfillment of sustainable supply chain management goals. So according to this research gap, a new framework was presented in this study to enable tile and ceramic industry managers, to focus on mentioned interaction and manage the businesses challenges in the desired way to achieve sustainable supply chain goals.

Critical Barriers to Social Responsibility Implementation within Mega-Construction Projects: The Case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Even though social responsibility (SR) has been widely discussed as a business concept, it is still not being effectively implemented within mega-construction projects due to a range of barriers. Overcoming these barriers requires detailed information, however, there is a lack of research on the barriers to SR implementation within mega-construction projects, particularly in developing countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). This study thus aims to investigate the critical barriers to SR implementation with reference to mega-construction projects in the KSA. Eleven barriers were identified from a comprehensive literature review and interviews with experts. These barriers were examined in more detail using a questionnaire survey on two current mega-construction projects in the KSA. There were no differences in the ranking of barriers between the two projects with the 136 respondents identifying the top seven SR barriers as being: (i) additional costs; (ii) lack of awareness and knowledge; (iii) lack of guidelines and coherent strategy; (iv) lack of stakeholder communication; (v) lack of law enforcement; (vi) lack of training; and (vii) unclear project requirements. The findings of this study not only contribute to deeper understanding of the critical SR implementation barriers, but could also encourage industry practitioners and stakeholders to improve SR activities for more effective SR implementation. Moreover, identification and ranking of the critical barriers allows decision-makers to prioritize and develop effective strategies to tackle them at both project and sector scale. Future studies should investigate the interrelationship between the critical barriers and their impact on SR implementation

Employing fuzzy ANP for ranking the personality of international brands in the sports shoe industry

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a quantitative basis to analytically determine the ranking of the brand personality of Adidas, Asics, Nike, Puma and Saucony brands among Iranian customers via a conventional multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method.

Design/methodology/approach

Data for determining the importance of evaluation criteria and ranking of brands are gathered by means of distributing questionnaires among a group of Iranian customers of sport shoes, as well as some industrial experts. The fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) was used to rank the brands with regard to dependencies between criteria and alternatives.

Findings

The results indicate that FANP is a capable method which provides invaluable insights for strategic marketing decisions in the sport product industry. Results show Adidas has the best performance in the sports shoe market compared to the other four brands. In this study, it was found that expertise sophistication was the most important criterion among Aaker’s five main criteria.

Originality/value

The value of this paper is applying FANP decision-making method for ranking sport shoe brands. This method has not been commonly used in the area of marketing, hence it is added to the pool of techniques used in ranking brands. In addition, evaluation and ranking of brands can be very useful for both academic research and practice. Researchers can benchmark the competences of each brand through evaluating them, and industrialists can extract the competitive advantages of the selected brands.

Analysing and Prioritizing the Antecedents of Customer Shopping Experience Using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) Modelling

The aim of this study is to analyse and prioritize the antecedents of customer shopping experience to enhance the understanding of marketers about what their consumers really want. The construct of customer shopping experience in the consumer behaviour theory is a well acclaimed one and has been studied in several contexts with varied perspectives; however, the researchers seldom noticed any endeavour to prioritize the antecedents of the shopping experience from the experts’ viewpoint. The present study endeavours to utilize analytical hierarchy process (AHP) modelling to find the degree of importance that customers attach to different criteria of the three key precursors of shopping experience, that is, the store environment, the social environment and the purchase motives with their underlying sub-criteria. The results of the study evidently propagate social environment as the most important criterion followed by store environment and purchase motives. This ranking is not just an ordinary exposition of placing one before another, but it expounds that the consumer is much concerned about the environment while making a buying decision. The key sub-criterion of social environment is customer interaction, which means that the customer is more concerned about the social interactions that have the potential to influence their psychology when they shop with their family or peer group. These results have several interestingly explorable implications for both retailers as well as marketers.

Modeling the CSR barriers in manufacturing industries

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify and rank the various barriers of the CSR implementation in Indian manufacturing companies. Further, this paper also studies interaction of different barriers.

Design/methodology/approach

The study was carried out using an interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach to analyze the interaction among different barriers for corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation in manufacturing companies in the Indian context.

Findings

In the present study, ten CSR implementation barriers were identified through an extensive literature review followed by the expert’s opinion. The present study outlines that lack of money and consumer’s passive attitude towards CSR are the major barriers in CSR implementation in Indian manufacturing companies. On the other hand, top management commitment, lack of knowledge about CSR and lack of skills for CSR implementation are barriers which occur due to the investment required in term of time and consumer’s passive attitude.

Originality/value

The present study is helpful to both academicians and practitioners by providing a model of CSR barriers. This study is important in the context of India which is a developing economy and this development is exerting pressure on the corporations to adopt CSR in their practices. This ISM-based model of barriers of CSR implementation in the manufacturing sector will help practitioners and managers to have enhanced knowledge about these barriers and to concentrate on important barriers to implement CSR activities in their organizations in an efficient manner.

Analyzing enablers of sustainable supply chain: ISM and fuzzy AHP approach

Purpose

This paper aims to intend to help focal firms which are keen to develop a sustainable supply chain by identifying enablers, in knowing the interrelationships involved and in ranking the enablers.

Design/methodology/approach

Interpretive structural modeling and fuzzy MICMAC were used for the modeling and clustering of the enablers and fuzzy analytical hierarchy process has been used for the ranking purpose.

Findings

Awareness about sustainability incentives, pressure from stakeholders, support from supply chain partners and demand from customer for sustainable products were found very important for developing a sustainable supply chain.

Research limitations/implications

This research will help practitioners to appreciate the importance of the enablers to focus on the making sustainability adoption feasible across the supply chain. This would also facilitate focal firm management to develop a sustainability culture across the supply chain.

Originality/value

Similar work has not been carried before in which interaction among enablers and their priorities were analyzed using hybrid methodologies in developing country context.