A Critic-Promethee Ii-Based Barrier Analysis To Ethical Sourcing

Consumer values, investor scrutiny, regulatory obligations, and the need for resilient and sustainable supply chains (SCs) have made ethical sourcing a crucial part of strategy within the global market. Further, ethical sourcing aids in reviving the brand image and competitive capabilities. Nonetheless, firms encounter a variety of challenges when they seek to incorporate sustainable and ethical practices into their supply chains. Financial limitations around the implementation and maintenance of ethical standards, a lack of transparency due to intricate supply chain structures, inadequate regulatory frameworks, a lack of top management support over enforcing the necessary changes, a lack of consumer awareness and demand for ethically sourced products to incentivize firms to adopt ethical practices, geopolitical uncertainties, industry-specific hurdles etc. are merely a few of them. In this pretext, research has been embarked on listing the barriers in the form of literature reviews, assessing the barriers within a specific context, or analyzing a specific barrier. Nevertheless, a dearth of research is observed with respect to comprehensively identifying, classifying, and determining barrier weights to rank strategies collated through governments, businesses, and all stakeholders, towards simultaneously addressing numerous barriers. Hence, this study aims at identifying and categorizing an exhaustive set of barriers towards embracing ethical and responsible sourcing practices within supply chains through leveraging on the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) towards reaching expert consensus on grouping the barriers highlighted through the literature review into different categories, and a hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach integrating CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation)-PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment Evaluation II) methods towards determining the empirical weights of the barriers for ranking and prioritization of strategies extracted from the literature to address the ethical sourcing barriers in a simultaneous fashion.