Three decades of research on ethics and sustainability in supply chain management have coincided with three decades of failure. Forced labour persists in supply chains carrying internationally recognised sustainability certifications. Audit regimes generate paper trails of conformance while leaving working conditions substantively unchanged. Corporate codes of conduct proliferate even as decoupling widens the gap between stated commitment and observable outcome widens. The question this special issue seeks to ask is not how supply chains can be made more ethical, but why they so reliably fail to be so.
This framing distinguishes our special issue from much of the existing literature, which treats unethical supply chain conduct as a governance deficit to be corrected through better compliance mechanisms, stronger codes, or more rigorous auditing. We argue that this framing has run its course. If compliance-based approaches have demonstrated limited success in improving working conditions in global supply chains (Soundararajan et al., 2025), it is not because compliance mechanisms are poorly designed; it is because the conditions that produce unethical decisions are structural, and tools designed to patch symptoms cannot address root causes. Understanding those root causes is the necessary precondition for designing interventions that work.
Contemporary supply chains present a particularly urgent version of this challenge. The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, 2024) moves ethical responsibility from voluntary commitment to legal obligation — yet whether regulatory codification produces genuine improvement or more sophisticated conformance remains debated (Pinnington et al., 2023). Artificial intelligence is being adopted across procurement, logistics, and supplier management at a pace that outstrips ethical oversight, with algorithms trained on historical data potentially systematising bias and opacity in ways that are difficult to detect or contest (Attard-Frost and Widder, 2025). Geopolitical fragmentation is reshaping global sourcing under the pressures of strategic rivalry and nationalism, raising urgent questions about who bears the cost of supply chain restructuring and who bears responsibility for those left behind (Roscoe et al., 2022). And at the organisational level, procurement professionals and supply chain managers routinely make decisions that they know to be ethically compromised, within institutional environments that make the ethical choice the more costly one.
This special issue brings together scholars from operations management, business ethics, technology management, organisation theory, and supply chain management to examine these conditions systematically. The special issue focuses on instances in which supply chain actors consistently violate widely accepted moral norms, concerning harm, rights, or fairness. Our organising question is what makes these unethical decisions rational, routine, and structurally produced? In addressing this question, we intend to redirect scholarly attention from governance solutions to causal mechanisms of persistent unethical behaviour in modern supply chains.
List of Topic Areas
- Structural and macroeconomic drivers of unethical decisions in operations and supply chains.
- Political and geopolitical drivers of unethical decisions in operations and supply chains.
- Organisational and behavioural drivers of unethical decisions in operations and supply chains.
- Technological drivers of unethical decisions in operations and supply chains.
Guest Editors
Frank Wiengarten, ESADE, Spain, frank.wiengarten@esade.edu
Annachiara Longoni, ESADE, Spain, annachiara.longoni@esade.edu
Javier Amaya, ESADE, Spain, Javier.amaya@esade.edu
Anton Shevchenko, Concordia University, Canada, anton.shevchenko@concordia.ca
Submissions Information
Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.
Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.
Journal Information: Scopus Journal Q1, H-Index 177
Key Deadlines
Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 1st December 2026
Closing date for manuscripts submission: 28th February 2027
For more details refer here
