Evaluating barriers and solutions for social sustainability adoption in multi-tier supply chains

Multi-tier sustainable supply chain management (MT-SSCM) is increasingly attracting a great deal of interest in academia and practice. However, attention to social sustainability has been relatively limited, and the initiatives of implementing social sustainability, especially in low-tier suppliers in supply chains, are facing enormous barriers and obstacles. The central aim of this paper is to investigate the obstacles that hinder the adoption of social sustainability in the multi-tier supply chain (MT-SC) and prioritise the most effective solutions to promote the adoption of this critical concept. Therefore, we based an extensive literature review on identifying the most relevant barriers and solutions to social sustainability adoption in MT-SC. Moreover, we propose a hybrid and multi-context methodology based on hesitant fuzzy sets (HFS), cumulative prospect theory (CPT) along with VIKOR to identify the most prominent barriers and solutions for three supply-chain sectors, i.e. chemical, agri-food, and textile. The results indicate that solutions to social sustainability in MT-SC are sensitive to the supply chain sector. However, there is a general trend toward adopting emerging technologies and openness and transparency-based relationships with the external environment. Managers could use these results to redirect their strategies to promote social sustainability, particularly in low-tier suppliers in under-developed countries.