A META-ANALYSIS ON SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: AN ANALYTICAL APPROACH

Abstract

Sustainability in Supply Chain is a key area in business that great attention is being looked into by academicians and practioners in recent times. The literature of sustainable supply chain management is still scant and several literature review has been conducted to investigate the state of the art knowledge of sustainable supply chain management. The field of text mining is rapidly evolving but little has been done on the techniques used in the study of sustainable supply chain management. The major objective of the study was to conduct a meta–analysis of the literature review studies in the area of sustainable supply chain management. Specifically the objective of the study was to find out the state of the art knowledge in sustainable supply chain and to use text mining techniques to derive the most frequent used words in keywords, abstracts and conclusion of the literature review papers on sustainable supply chain management. Major trends and current research topics in sustainable supply chain management were identified. A total of 57 papers were identified, the process was iterative involving many hours of reading, additional collection of literature, synthesis and refinement. The leading peer reviewed journals, universities, and authors were identified as well. The study adopted meta-analysis and content based qualitative approach of published literature for assessing the appropriateness of the framework presented in the research articles. More specifically the alignment between keywords, abstract and conclusion was studied. Finally, suggestion and recommendation was provided for the research agenda in the field of sustainable supply chain management.