Sustainability boundaries of actors in a supply chain: a longitudinal analysis of the Swedish mining sector

Abstract

Shareholders, society, and other stakeholders increasingly expect firms to extend their boundary to include sustainability effects in the supply chain and beyond. The purpose of this paper is to describe sustainability reporting boundaries among key actors in the Swedish mining sector over time to describe how boundary change supports sustainable supply chains. Our analysis of annual reports from 1990-2020 identified sustainability boundary extensions driven by collaboration on sustainability initiatives and increased supplier monitoring in all firms. However, the extensions were largely firm-centric; we therefore stress the importance of increasing supply chain-level reporting of boundaries to account for broader sustainability effects.