Ethical Sourcing Codes of Large UK-Based Corporations: Prevalence, Content, Limitations

By Lutz Preuss. 2009

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Codes of conduct have become the perhaps most often used tool to manage corporate social responsibility (CSR). Researchers have primarily analysed such documents at company-wide or trans-company levels, whereas there is a dearth of studies into the use of codes for particular corporate functions. Hence, this article will examine one particular group of sub-company level codes, namely codes of conduct that stipulate CSR criteria for suppliers. Examining such ethical sourcing policies adopted by the FTSE100 corporations, the article draws out what environmental, social and economic issues large corporations perceive to be important in the management of their supply chains. At an aggregate level, the coverage of CSR issues is rather extensive, yet at the level of the individual corporation a degree of selectivity in the issues that are addressed becomes noticeable. The code content analysis furthermore confirms the business case and public pressure to be the most important drivers of CSR. Finally, the study highlights the role of isomorphic processes in the adoption of CSR tools.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17ad7626ae8953cbc6ca050706f38cda9308f36d

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Citations in the corpus

Private Regulation and Trade Union Rights: Why Codes of Conduct Have Limited Impact on Trade Union Rights (2014, background): “It is more than 20 years since the first codes of conduct related to worker rights at suppliers were developed by companies such as Levi’s and Nike (Zadek 2004), and over the years both the adoption and content of codes of conduct have become institutionalized (Long and Driscoll 2008; Preuss 2009).”
An empirical examination of the relationship between business strategy and socially responsible supply chain management (2013, background): “…social responsibility may be closely related with the firm’s business strategy (McWilliams and Siegel, 2001; Van De Ven and Jeurissen, 2005), relatively little is known about the relationship between business strategy and responsible supply chain management (Preuss, 2009; Park and Dickson, 2008).”
Social Sustainability in Selecting Emerging Economy Suppliers (2011, background): “…research concerning social issues in emerging market sourcing applies a case study approach (Andersen and Skjoett-Larsen, 2009; Tsoi, 2010; Yu, 2008) or provides a descriptive overview on the use of social standards and codes of conduct (Preuss, 2009; Tate et al., 2010; van Tulder et al., 2009).”
Impact of Corporate Environmental Responsibility on Operating Income: Moderating Role of Regional Disparities in China (2016, unknown): “The fourth method is content analysis, which is a method that defines standard scores and collects information on social responsibility from relevant reports and files, thus measuring CSR based on disclosed social responsibility information (Vuontisjarvi 2006; Montabon et al. 2007; Cornelius et al. ”
Management of Social Issues in Supply Chains: A Literature Review Exploring Social Issues, Actions and Performance Outcomes (2017, background): “Labour lies at the heart of the social dimension of sustainability for firms, which is most often addressed in terms of adopting supply chain actions like CSR (Preuss 2009).”