eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

Corporate responsibility (CR) has become one of the key themes in business life and in academic literature and research. As companies need to be increasingly responsive towards stakeholders´ expectations, practices how companies have adopted CR have expanded rapidly over time. A very topical and important CR issue is how to incorporate CR into global sourcing and procurement successfully. This thesis has three themes for enhancing knowledge in this field.

The first theme concerns contextuality of CR (in global procurement). Despite the fact that companies are internally and externally remarkably different, literature provides strong suggestions and “best practices” for companies to follow. In this thesis a thorough literature review was conducted on best practices and constructs present in the extant literature. After this phase the feasibility of these suggestions was analyzed in the context of a single case company (consumer brands industry).

The second theme concerns managerial practices in general terms. Multifaceted information was gathered about why and how the case company develops and aims to implement its global procurement responsibility program. The third theme concerns understanding about different strategies and management practices of incorporating CR into global procurement, also from an analytical conceptual point of view.

Methodologically the thesis is grounded especially on inductive empirical findings from the single case study but also on deductive conclusions grounded on the literature analysis. Results have several academic and managerial implications: • a thorough referential listing of best practices and constructs for incorporating CR into global procurement was generated especially for managerial purposes • context matters, although this is undervalued in the literature: best practices successful in some contexts might not be feasible in others, but the content and the process of managing CR in global procurement are context-laden • important processual perspective of generating and implementing CR in global procurement is neglected in the literature • management models usually present in the literature are not holistic but lack or undervalue certain constructs or interrelationships between constructs, leading for instance to short-sighted and sub-optimal compliance-management • several managerial reference points and experiences were provided by analyzing and disclosing the content and the development process of the initiative in the case company • different ways to carry out CR (in global procurement) may lead to remarkably different financial and societal outcomes. Capacity-building in the supplier base is a potential source of competitive advantage and sustainability