How Social and Environmental Practices are integrated in the upstream supply chain

Sustainability is becoming more and more important in many industrial sectors and many organisations are trying to address environmental and social dimensions at both an operational and strategical level. However, this represents a big challenge for a firm alone, while a network perspective is needed. This paper intends to explore how a company can extend sustainability to its upstream supply network. By investigating eight case studies in the fashion industry we noted an important tendency of delegating control activities and sustainability issues to the first-tier suppliers, while only in some cases a collaboration approach was applied.