Integrating the environmental and social sustainability pillars into the lean and agile supply chain management paradigms: A literature review and future research directions

Established supply chain management paradigms such as leanness, agility, and sustainability have received increased attention in the literature, but mainly as separate topics. However, while the importance of sustainability as a competitive priority has grown significantly in recent years, companies still try to reconcile the pressures of enhancing their supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. Thus, understanding what is the best way for companies to design and implement a system of practices that meets, on the one hand, the environmental and social requirements of a wide set of stakeholders and, on the other hand, the need to be lean (efficient and waste free) and/or agile (fast and flexible to the needs of the market place) is critical. Our paper develops a systematic literature review addressing the integration of lean, agile and sustainable supply chain management paradigms. 73 papers are analysed, deriving 6 types of integration between lean & sustainable and agile & sustainable supply chain paradigms. To achieve each type of integration, a set of practices are highlighted. Interestingly, the same practices can support different integration types. The paper discusses possible reasons behind these differences and provides future research directions. We suggest further studies should be devoted to investigating the agile – sustainable paradigms integration more in depth as well as the effect of including social dimension when considering the integration between established and sustainable supply chain paradigms. Moreover, we address the lack of empirical studies and the need to take an evolutionary perspective when looking at the integration. Finally, we suggest developing conceptual and empirical studies on whether and how integration between paradigms is contingent upon the strategic relevance of sustainability.