Download or read book Ensuring Sustainability Compliance with Voluntary Sustainability Standards in Supply Chains written by Robert Ober and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sustainable economic behaviour has become an increasingly important topic. It has caused firms to be confronted with rising public attention to this particular subject. In order to cope with the mentioned development, companies started to manifest the sustainability of their operations in widely used voluntary sustainability standards today. However, the fact that supply chains have rather become complex supply chain networks nowadays hampers the process of successfully ensuring compliance with these standards. Besides, in the perception of consumers any breaches of sustainability standards in the supply chain fall back onto the brand owner, and subsequently pose major risks to buyer companies. Thus, buyer firms eagerly seek to enforce their standards throughout the supply chain. Among other factors the power distribution between the players in the supply chain has an impact on the likelihood that buyer companies manage to enforce their sustainability standards. The thesis at hand therefore investigates the influence of different power relationships in the supply chain on the compliance achievement process. In that course the buyer, supplier, sub-supplier triad is analysed in depth as an excerpt and simplifying approximation of the focal supply chain network. Five case studies are subsequently reviewed in order to come up with propositions of which power circumstances support the buyers' endeavour to successfully ensure compliance with their sustainability standards.