Sustainable supply chain management and inter‐organizational resources: a literature review

Abstract On the basis of a content analysis, this paper explores the role of sustainable supply chain management as a catalyst of generating valuable inter‐organizational resources and thus possible sustained inter‐firm competitive advantage through collaboration on environmental and social issues. Drawing on the resource‐based view and its extension, the relational view, this paper highlights that partner‐focused supply management capabilities evolve to corporate core competences as competition shifts from an inter‐firm to an inter‐supply‐chain level. The ‘collaborative paradigm’ in supply chain management regards strategic collaboration as a crucial source of competitive advantage. Collaboration is even more essential when supply chains aim at ensuring simultaneously economic, environmental and social performance on a product's total life‐cycle basis. Inter‐firm resources and capabilities emerging from supply‐chain‐wide collaboration are prone to become sources of sustained inter‐firm competitive advantage, since they are socially complex, causally ambiguous and historically grown and hence particularly difficult to imitate by competitors. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.