Balancing priorities: Decision‐making in sustainable supply chain management

Abstract The need for environmental protection and increasing demands for natural resources are forcing companies to reconsider their business models and restructure their supply chain operations. Scholars and proactive companies have begun to create more sustainable supply chains. What has not been fully addressed is how organizations deal with short‐term pressures to remain economically viable while implementing these newly modeled supply chains. In this study, we use theory‐building through case studies to answer the question: how do organizations balance short‐term profitability and long‐term environmental sustainability when making supply chain decisions under conditions of uncertainty? We present five sets of propositions that explain how exemplars in green supply chain management make decisions and balance short and long term objectives. We also identify four environmental postures that help explain the decisions organizations make when dealing with strategic trade‐offs among the economic, environmental and social elements of the triple‐bottom‐line.