Dynamics of Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Post-COVID-19 Era: A Bibliometric Literature Review

Introduction

With the globalizing economies, the needs of societies, the way businesses work and competition methods are changing rapidly. This globalization process has made it necessary to develop and implement supply chain management (SCM) strategies. One of the applications that will provide the best competitive advantage for businesses is sustainable supply chain management. With the new world order, businesses started to see the world as a single market in terms of both supply and sales of the products they produce. Supply chain managers' duties should be focusing on functional relationships between global organizations as well as creating a strong link amongst the supply chain members. In other words, they must ensure a sustainable value chain.

The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 virus could not be prevented and it became a pandemic, deeply affecting almost all countries and regions. The coronavirus pandemic has become one of the most important threats to the world. The COVID-19 outbreak has not only cost the lives and the health of millions of people but also negatively affected the global economy. The pandemic has devastating effects on all supply chains globally by causing a sudden change in the demands for raw materials and intermediates used in production. Moreover, in the pandemic, most of the employees had to work from home. Hence, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of global supply chains sustainability (Ketchen & Craighead, 2020; Tasnım, 2020; Ishida, 2020; Frederico, 2021; Baz & Ruel, 2021; Paul et al., 2021).

Sustainability is critical to the long-term success of businesses besides progressively requiring the correlation of not only financial, economic and administrative but also environmental and social impacts of all activities of the organisation. (Zhang, et al, 2021). For this reason, organizations that want to achieve long-term success in supply chain management must attach great importance to sustainability. Through this, they can experience stable progress in the organization lifetime (Ahmed et al., 2019). Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) manages the flow of materials, information, labour and capital throughout a supply chain, as well as the cooperation of companies on the chain. In addition, it is to set and realize financial, economic, environmental and social goals regarding three important points. Competitiveness should be strengthened by combining the economic criteria of sustainability with customer expectations (Seuring and Müller, 2008). In other words, in the SCM process, to boost the long-term economic performance of organisations; the economic, social and environmental objectives of the company should be taken into account while ensuring the integration of important inter-organizational business processes (Carter & Rogers, 2008).

Sustainability has gained more importance with the effect of increasing economic activities. One of the important conditions of being sustainable in supply chain management is knowledge and data integration. To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage, organizations must manage data well, successfully respond to, and manage feedback (Xu et al., 2019; Zhang et al. 2021). In this natural progression, SSCM has become a field of study by authors in recent years. This study was carried out to review the recent developments in sustainable supply chain management literature. Furthermore, it aims to overview the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on SSCM literature. After introducing the background of literature, the methodology is given, the findings from the descriptive and co-citation analyses are discussed in the subsequent sections. Finally, solutions and recommendations, future research directions and conclusion has been presented respectivelly.