Glob­al Sourcing Man­age­ment: A Sus­tain­able Pro­cure­ment Per­spect­ive

Course content

The global society is increasingly engaged in endeavors to transition into a greener future, and this builds pressure on companies in terms of playing an active role in achieving the new ambitious environmental objectives. However, as the environmental impact of a company reaches far outside its own local production, reducing this impact is a complex and challenging task that involves the active participation of many supply chain actors. Specifically, the purchasing and supply management function plays a fundamental role in dealing with the environmental impact in the supply network. In this course, we set out to explore:

• How purchasing and supply management processes are designed and practiced to transition the supply network to higher levels of environmental sustainability.

The focus of the course is dual as we are interested in understanding the practices and decision-making that take place inside the buying organization, but also in how the purchasing and supply management function engages with and are dependent on suppliers to push the green agenda upstream in the supply network.

In this course, we explore how procurement managers perform global sourcing activities and how traditional sourcing practices can be understood to require change when the ambition is a sustainable supply network. Thus the course will both provide in depth knowledge about traditional strategic procurement and sourcing practices, but also engage in an analysis of strategic change designed to transition towards sustainable procurement practices.   

A central ambition is to understand how different types of structures, processes, incentives and relationships both inside the organization and in the global supply network can be understood to enable or hinder change designed to improve environmental performance. Such an ambition is fundamental as global supply networks often account for a substantial part of the focal buying organizations environmental footprint.

In the course we will adopt different theoretical lenses, such as theories from the domains of operations and supply chain management, organizational studies, sociology, and performance management. These different theoretical perspectives will help us understand the complexity of managing global sourcing from a sustainable procurement perspective. The different and often complementary theoretical perspectives will further help us reflect on how to design and implement strategies and specific practices to deal with this complexity.