Open Access

Dennis Stindt

• The paradigm of sustainability altered the way corporate and private actors’ actions are perceived and how society evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of both production and consumption. Companies encounter pressures from legislation, competition and consumers that force them to incorporate aspects of environmental and social performance into decision-making. Hence, corporate sustainability, which describes the adaption of the sustainability paradigm into the realm of businesses, became a guiding principle for executives and raises interest among practitioners and academia alike. The operationalization of corporate sustainability induces a totally new set of challenges non-existent in traditional decision-making. Problems of sustainability are highly complex due to a large number of interacting elements and system properties that are hard to identify (Hall et al., 2012). Indeed, questions regarding the assessment and evaluation of environmental and social performance arise asThe paradigm of sustainability altered the way corporate and private actors’ actions are perceived and how society evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of both production and consumption. Companies encounter pressures from legislation, competition and consumers that force them to incorporate aspects of environmental and social performance into decision-making. Hence, corporate sustainability, which describes the adaption of the sustainability paradigm into the realm of businesses, became a guiding principle for executives and raises interest among practitioners and academia alike. The operationalization of corporate sustainability induces a totally new set of challenges non-existent in traditional decision-making. Problems of sustainability are highly complex due to a large number of interacting elements and system properties that are hard to identify (Hall et al., 2012). Indeed, questions regarding the assessment and evaluation of environmental and social performance arise as well as the balancing of various aspects of sustainability within qualitative and quantitative decision-support models. Therefore, this research sets out to provide comprehensive guidelines and planning models within a subset of corporate sustainability management, namely sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). Focusing on this particular but still broad topic, the contributions compiled in this thesis address the following research questions guiding the overall research project: Q1: How can the field of SSCM research be structured and which subproblems can be identified? Q2: How can complex and ill-defined problems of SSCM be encountered addressing problems of data definition, data acquisition and data processing? Q3: How can quantitative decision-support models be adapted taking into account the specific characteristics of sustainability? This doctoral thesis encompasses an introductory section that structures the research project and delineates some general characteristics of SSCM research. A total of eight scientific publications addressing the research questions constitute sections 2 to 9. Finally, a summarizing discussion is given and promising fields for future research are proposed.…