Abstract

Background: Supply chain resilience and sustainability have rarely been considered together, neither in literature nor in practice. The need to pursue both approaches is partly due to end- customer pressure for more sustainable practices. Also, Covid-19 demonstrated the importance of a resilient supply chain, especially upstream, which brings sourcing into focus. To achieve both, sourcing strategies need to be effectively changed. This is a challenge especially for family businesses, as they hold on to traditional values and are reluctant to make investments.

Purpose: Efforts to achieve resilience and sustainability in sourcing are often accompanied by conflicting goals. In addition, family businesses have special characteristics with a strong focus on social capital. This mentioned combination has not yet been addressed in the literature, which is why the aim of this thesis is to find out how sustainability is integrated into the resilient sourcing strategies of family businesses.

Method: To achieve the research objective, a multiple case-study with family businesses from Germany is conducted. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews are used. CPOs or CEOs of different case companies are asked, how they integrate sustainability into their resilient sourcing structures.

Conclusion: The result of our study is a pool of different sourcing strategies of the considered family businesses, which are almost exclusively sustainable. This is due to the nature of a family business, which automatically generates sustainability through values such as regionality and long-term orientation. Awareness of the sustainability level of sourcing strategies reveals trade-offs and thus helps practitioners to use them effectively.