Are Certified Supply Chains More Socially Sustainable? A Bargaining Power Analysis

• Main Authors: Bellassen, V. (Author), Böhm, M. (Author), Csillag, P. (Author), Donati, M. (Author), Drut, M. (Author), Ferrer-Pérez, H. (Author), Gauvrit, L. (Author), Gil, J.M (Author), Hoang, V. (Author), Malak-Rawlikowska, A. (Author), Mattas, K. (Author), Muller, P. (Author), Napasintuwong, O. (Author), Nguyen, A. (Author), Papadopoulos, I. (Author), Ristic, B. (Author), Stojanovic, Z. (Author), Török, Á (Author), Tsakiridou, E. (Author), Veneziani, M. (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: De Gruyter Open Ltd 2021
• Subjects: bargaining power; institutions; market power; social sustainability indicator; transaction costs
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher
• ISBN: 15420485 (ISSN)
• DOI: 10.1515/jafio-2019-0039

Food quality schemes (FQS: organic and geographical indication products) are often supposed to be more sustainable by their political advocates. We explore the social sustainability advantage of FQS through the lens of supply chains' bargaining power (BP) distribution. We propose an indicator synthesizing different sources underlying BP (competition-based, transactional, institutional) and counting two dimensions (fair BP distribution and adaptation capacity), that we apply to 18 FQS supply chains and corresponding reference. FQS perform better than their reference products on both dimensions. This better performance is due to a combination of sources. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.