Logistics social responsibility: Standard adoption and practices in Italian companies

This paper deals with Logistics Social Responsibility (LSR), i.e. the socially responsible management of the supply chain under a cross-functional perspective. In particular, the goal of the paper is to develop a taxonomy of the LSR practices adopted by firms. The taxonomy is built based on a literature review and an empirical analysis. In particular, the empirical analysis deals with the analysis of the non-financial reports (i.e. social, environmental, sustainability report, environmental statement, and/or SA8000 report) published by a sample of Italian companies. The taxonomy involves 47 different LSR practices classified based on five areas, namely Purchasing Social Responsibility, Sustainable Transportation, Sustainable Packaging, Sustainable Warehousing, and Reverse Logistics. The practices are further investigated to assess which and to what extent they are adopted by different categories of companies. To this aim, we use an ad hoc-defined metric, the Adoption Index, and carry out a cross-analysis. By providing an encompassing view of all the LSR issues and practices, our paper represents an initial attempt to fill a gap in the literature on LSR.