Making the Case for OM Research on Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Atalay Atasu and Christopher Tang

We strive to do innovative research that has impact, not only in terms of opening pathways to other researchers but also in terms of how it affects practice and gets appreciation from the broader research community. Identifying innovative and impactful research ideas can be easier if one has an eye on the dynamics of what is relevant in the business world. In this blogpost, we aim to highlight an opportunity to do innovative and potentially impactful operations management research in a particular research field, sustainability.

One could argue that the term sustainability has gained exponentially increasing popularity in the business world in the last 20 years. This is because the increased visibility of environmental and social problems associated with different business practices has created substantial market pressure on companies. In turn, recent surveys with CEOs, senior executives, and managers suggest that sustainability issues are quite important in their agendas and they are indeed making plans to address them.  This perspective is clearly apparent in the recent McKinsey survey report, which has already been impactful. From our perspective, this survey reveals many interesting insights for the OM community, which relate to the strategic reasons for sustainability initiatives and the critical role of an operational perspective in implementing those initiatives (please see the figure below).

Source: The business of sustainability: McKinsey Global Survey results, 2011

What is striking to us is that many of the actionable items in the McKinsey Report that seem to give a competitive edge to firms are operational. Those action items are also quite closely tied to a number of research streams that have been popular in the operations domain in the last two decades as well. Those include research on Product Development, Value Chain Management, Resource Utilization in Closed-Loop Systems (Energy, Emissions, Waste, or Water), and Risk Management. Many of those action items can take the form of emerging topics in our field, and help form the basis for hypotheses for us to conduct behavioral experiments, empirical analysis, and analytical studies.  Specifically, some key research questions that come to our mind include: (a) Will sustainable practice generate organic growth due to new products / new customers / new markets?   (b) Can sustainable products create economic value in terms of higher selling price / higher demand?  (c) What are the process innovations that can create economic value in terms of cost / carbon footprint / waste / resource reduction?  (d)  When developing new products / services, do companies weigh sustainability more tend to generate better performance?  (e)  How would the sustainability performance of upstream supply chain partners affect the performance of downstream partners? Surely, many related questions have been explored to some extent in our field disciplines referred to above, but there clearly are many other open questions that remain unanswered at the interface of sustainability and operations management.

If one were to expand this perspective to the broader corporate social responsibility context, which includes many questions around sustainability as well as social welfare (i.e., welfare of the producers, workers and consumers) issues, social justice, income/gender equity, public health and safety, and business ethics, the opportunities for impactful OM research are even broader.

It is clear and evident that sustainability and corporate social responsibility research in the business community has observed significant growth in the last two decades. This trend is nicely reflected in the following figure that is based on a search through the Scopus Citation Database for Social Science and Humanities using the following keywords: “sustainability”, “social innovations”, “social responsibility” and “corporate social responsibility”. We speculate that the trends of sustainability and socially responsibility research will continue and the OM community can stay ahead of the curve by exploring these exciting research topics such as social responsibility and social innovations. We have seen indications of this in our field journals, and sincerely hope that this trend and our research impact will continue to grow even stronger.

Source:  Lee, H.L., and Tang, C.S., “Socially and Environmentally Responsible Value Chain Innovations:
New Operations Management Research Opportunities," working paper, UCLA Anderson School, 2016.

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Christopher Tang
Professor
University of California-Los Angeles
Los Angeles CA
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