Special Issue of Production and Operations Management: Measuring the Impact of Sustainable Operations

摘要

The OM community has embraced "sustainability" as a key area of activity in recent years, focusing so far mostly on the environmental dimension of sustainability. The calls for business to focus increased resources on sustainable operations have intensified and broadened in the last few years, now including major research efforts in closed-loop supply chains, humanitarian logistics, carbon footprinting of supply chains, product and process innovations directed towards improving energy efficiency, sustainable transport, and many other areas that have strong intersections with the traditional purview of OM. Notwithstanding some progress in these areas, most work published in OM journals has not explicitly measured the impacts of the alternatives being studied. The objective of this special issue is to bridge the gap between existing research on sustainable operations, including links to traditional measures of profit and risk, and approaches that exist for measuring environmental and social impacts from other disciplines.