eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

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Sustainability has gained growing interests among both practitioners and academics with the environment that we are living in deteriorates. With the consumers' advocate towards sustainability, companies nowadays are also trying to integrate the theme into theirs business operations thus developing sustainable organization capabilities that helps them to compete in the business world. The thesis picks up the angle of supply chain management to study the sustainable organization capabilities because greening the supply chain activities is also an area that's increasingly gaining public recognition.

The literature part of the thesis is fulfilled by reading previous literature on the topic thus providing guidelines for the research. The empirical part is done through the method of systematic review. The comparison between the two parts provides insights for further research. The objective of the thesis is define sustainable organizational capabilities through earlier literature and to explore its application within supply chain management field thus providing useful insights both for practitioners and academics.

The author used a quantitative research method in conducting a qualitative research. The main methodological framework of the thesis is systematic literature review. In addition, for developing the search concept, triple bottom line and Porter's value chain model are also engaged for providing guidelines for the study. The thesis engages systematic literature review as the main method for providing a comprehensive result of the current literature. With 226 defined search strings, the search took place between 2015 to year 2016. It covers the 5006 search hits, 2264 articles. Out of which, 24 are selected for final discussion.

The results provide a comprehensive overview of current literature in sustainable organizational capabilities in supply chain management including: procurement, supplier assessment, IT and also some other miscellaneous supply chain organizational capabilities.

In light to further research area, the author has also pointed out worthy exploring organisation operations such as material management and warehousing management. Practical wise, the author provided profound suggestions to supply chain managers and top level managers in business operations.