我国鞋服行业供应链社会责任驱动力与供应链绩效实证研究

CSR in Supply Chain: Empirical Study of its Drivers and Supply Chain Performance for the Chinese Apparel Industry

本文以我国鞋服行业为研究对象,分析了该行业中企业实施供应链社会责任的驱动力,并对供应链社会责任实施以及供应链绩效之间的关系进行了实证检验。研究结果表明,供应链社会责任实施的驱动力包括制度驱动力、声誉驱动力以及经济驱动力三个方面;此外,研究还发现对我国鞋服企业而言,目前供应链社会责任的实施对供应链绩效中客户服务绩效以及内部运作绩效会产生积极影响,但是对经济绩效有一定的消积作用。

Since China entered the WTO, an increasing number of Chinese companies have experienced social responsibility barriers and lost many international orders. Therefore, Chinese and multinational companies, such as Ford, GM and Toyota are paying attention to Corporate Social Responsibility （CSR） which includes economic, legal and ethical issues. This paper tries to provide theoretical and empirical evidence for apparel companies in China to conduct CSR in the supply chain which is called Logistics Social Responsibility （LSR）. This paper tries to identify three potential drivers of LSR： economics, institution and reputation. This paper also tries to answer the question whether implementing LSR will improve companies＇ performances including customer service performance, operations performance and economic performance respectively. In order to answer the above research questions, this paper develops six hypotheses according to the literatures review, adopts a mail survey, and employs the structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses. In the first part, we try to explain why LSR issues in China is an important research topic, especially for the apparel industry in China. In the second part, we proposed a research model based on the related literatures. Six hypotheses were proposed for the apparel industry in China： （1） economics factor is positively associated with a firm＇s logistics social responsibility; （2） institutional factor is positively associated with a firm＇s logistics social responsibility; （3） reputation is positively associated with a firm＇s logistics social responsibility; （4） a firm＇s logistics social responsibility is positively associated with a firm＇s customer service performance; （5） a firm＇s logistics social responsibility is positively associated with a firm＇s internal operations performance; and （6） a firm＇s logistics social responsibility is positively associated with a firm＇s economic performance. In the remains of this paper, we conduct a mail survey to collect a total of 228 firm-level questionnaires and employ structural equation modeling. Our results show that institutional factor, reputation and economics factors all exert positive influence on the implementations of LSR. Moreover, LSR has positive effect on the performance of supply chain management in terms of customer service and internal operations; however, it does not improve the economic performance of apparel companies. In summary, art increasing number of Chinese apparel companies are paying attention to LSR issue. However, at the early stage they need to invest in order to improve their LSR practices. That is why LSR cannot currently improve the economic performance. However, based on the successful experience in the developed countries Chinese companies can realize all the benefits of LSR in the future if they indeed regard LSR as a long-term business strategy. This paper still has some limitations as following： （1） the sample in the study is limited to the apparel companies located in Fujian and Guangdong Provinces because there are a lots of apparel companies in these two provinces. But this may potentially affect the quality and size of our samples, and it is necessary to conduct a larger survey around the country in the future; （2） the indicators adopted in the survey are limited to our understanding of LSR, its drivers and performance. It is necessary to implement a more thorough literature review so that to we can fully understand the LSR and design more comprehensive indicators; （3） this paper just focuses on the LSR drivers and its performance. However, there are still some important issues such as firm size, organizational culture, top management support and business strategy, which may affect the results of this paper. We will investigate these issues in the future.