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Journal of Operations Management 29 (2011) 577–590

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

Balancing priorities: Decision-making in sustainable supply chain management
Zhaohui Wu a,∗ , Mark Pagell b,1 a b

Oregon State University, College of Business, 200 Bexell Hall, Corvallis, OR 97331-2603, United States
Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 28 June 2008
Received in revised form
27 September 2010
Accepted 25 October 2010
Available online 3 November 2010
Keywords:
Green supply chain management
Decision-making
Sustainability

a b s t r a c t
The need for environmental protection and increasing demands for natural resources are forcing companies to reconsider their business models and restructure their supply chain operations. Scholars and proactive companies have begun to create more sustainable supply chains. What has not been fully addressed is how organizations deal with short-term pressures to remain economically viable while implementing these newly modeled supply chains. In this study, we use theory-building through case studies to answer the question: how do organizations balance short-term profitability and long-term environmental sustainability when making supply chain decisions under conditions of uncertainty? We present five sets of propositions that explain how exemplars in green supply chain management make decisions and balance short and long term objectives. We also identify four environmental postures that help explain the decisions organizations make when dealing with strategic trade-offs among the economic, environmental and social elements of the triple-bottom-line.
© 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Organizations have begun to examine their supply chains in response to numerous

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