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Fashioning the system: Qualitative system mapping to uncover feedback loops, root causes and leverage points in the textile and apparel industries
Abstract
The textile and apparel industries are highly globalized and characterized by vertical disintegration throughout the supply chain. They are also considered among the world’s most polluting and exploitative industries. The social and environmental sustainability problems in these interrelated industries traverse firm and national boundaries, making them highly complex, wicked problems. Systems thinking is an approach that can be used to evaluate and manage wicked problems, allowing researchers to identify root causes of complex problems, predict system behaviors and avoid unintended consequences of short-sighted decision making. Systems thinking requires understanding the interconnections between different system elements to determine the behavior of the system as a whole. This paper, part of the scenario-building work in the STN-funded FINIX project, seeks to answer the question, “What are the systemic environmental and social sustainability impacts of global textile systems?” To answer this, we are conducting an integrative literature review using a method for qualitative system mapping from documentary sources by coding the positive (A increases B) and negative (A decreases B) polarities in relationships between elements in a text. The relationships will be mapped to show the interconnections between them, resulting in a comprehensive system schematic. We expect to find that social and environmental challenges have interconnected causes, particularly driven by time and cost pressures in the
industry. We also expect that the drivers and enablers of these time and cost pressures are key leverage points in potential system change. This approach can help projects do early-stage system mapping, which can be used for future scenario building. Ultimately, system maps can challenge established thinking, bringing to light root causes for systemic problems and enabling corrective action directed to those pressing root causes.
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The fashion industry is the second largest industrial polluter after aviation, accounting for up to 10% of global pollution. Despite the widely publicized environmental impacts, however, the industry continues to grow, in part due to the rise of fast fashion, which relies on cheap manufacturing, frequent consumption and short-lived garment use. In this Review, we identify the environmental impacts at critical points in the textile and fashion value chain, from production to consumption, focusing on water use, chemical pollution, CO2 emissions and textile waste. Impacts from the fashion industry include over 92 million tonnes of waste produced per year and 1.5 trillion litres of water consumed. On the basis of these environmental impacts, we outline the need for fundamental changes in the fashion business model, including a deceleration of manufacturing and the introduction of sustainable practices throughout the supply chain, as well a shift in consumer behaviour — namely, decreasing clothing purchases and increasing garment lifetimes. These changes stress the need for an urgent transition back to ‘slow’ fashion, minimizing and mitigating the detrimental environmental impacts, so as to improve the long-term sustainability of the fashion supply chain.
Knowledge production within the field of business research is accelerating at a tremendous speed while at the same time remaining fragmented and interdisciplinary. This makes it hard to keep up with state-of-the-art and to be at the forefront of research, as well as to assess the collective evidence in a particular area of business research. This is why the literature review as a research method is more relevant than ever. Traditional literature reviews often lack thoroughness and rigor and are conducted ad hoc, rather than following a specific methodology. Therefore, questions can be raised about the quality and trustworthiness of these types of reviews. This paper discusses literature review as a methodology for conducting research and offers an overview of different types of reviews, as well as some guidelines to how to both conduct and evaluate a literature review paper. It also discusses common pitfalls and how to get literature reviews published.
1. Drawing on seminal work by the late Donella Meadows, we propose a leverage points perspective as a hitherto under‐recognized heuristic and practical tool for sustainability science. A leverage points perspective focuses on places to intervene in complex systems to bring about transformative change.
2. A leverage points perspective recognizes increasingly influential leverage points relating to changes in parameters, feedbacks, system design and the intent encapsulated by a given system. We discuss four key advantages of a leverage points perspective.
3. First advantage: A leverage points perspective can bridge causal and teleological explanations of system change – that is, change is seen to arise from variables influencing one another, but also from how human intent shapes the trajectory of a system.
4. Second advantage: A leverage points perspective explicitly recognizes influential, ‘deep’ leverage points – places at which interventions are difficult but likely to yield truly transformative change.
5. Third advantage: A leverage points perspective enables the examination of interactions between shallow and deep system changes – sometimes, relatively superficial interventions may pave the way for deeper changes, while at other times, deeper changes may be required for superficial interventions to work.
6. Fourth advantage: A leverage points perspective can function as a methodological boundary object – that is, providing a common entry point for academics from different disciplines and other societal stakeholders to work together.
7. Drawing on these strengths could initiate a new stream of sustainability studies, and may yield both practical and theoretical advances.
In recent years, there have been increasing concerns in the disposal of textile waste around the globe. The growth of textile markets not only depends on population growth but also depends on economic and fashion cycles. The fast fashion cycle in the textile industry has led to a high level of consumption and waste generation. This can cause a negative environmental impact since the textile and clothing industry is one of the most polluting industries. Textile manufacturing is a chemical-intensive process and requires a high volume of water throughout its operations. Wastewater and fiber wastes are the major wastes generated during the textile production process. On the other hand, the fiber waste was mainly created from unwanted clothes in the textile supply chain. This fiber waste includes natural fiber, synthetic fiber, and natural/synthetic blends. The natural fiber is mostly comprised of cellulosic material, which can be used as a resource for producing bio-based products. The main challenge for utilization of textile waste is finding the method that is able to recover sugars as monosaccharides. This review provides an overview of valorization of textile waste to value-added products, as well as an overview of different strategies for sugar recovery from cellulosic fiber and their hindrances.
So far, a vast amount of studies on sustainability in supply chain management have been conducted by academics over the last decade. Nevertheless, socially related aspects are still neglected in the related discussion. The primary motivation of the present literature review has arisen from this shortcoming, thus the key purpose of this study is to enrich the discussion by providing a state-of-the-art, focusing exclusively on social issues in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) by considering the textile/apparel sector as the field of application. The authors conduct a literature review, including content analysis which covers 45 articles published in English peer-reviewed journals, and proposes a comprehensive map which integrates the latest findings on socially related practices in the textile/apparel industry with the dominant conceptualization in order to reveal potential research areas in the field. The results show an ongoing lack of investigation regarding the social dimension of the triple bottom line in SSCM. Findings indicate that a company’s internal orientation is the main assisting factor in sustainable supply chain management practices. Further, supplier collaboration and assessment can be interpreted as an offer for suppliers deriving from stakeholders and a focal company’s management of social risk. Nevertheless, suppliers do also face or even create huge barriers in improving their social performance. This calls for more empirical research and qualitative or quantitative survey methods, especially at the supplier level located in developing countries.
This paper proposes a definition of systems thinking for use in a wide variety of disciplines, with particular emphasis on the development and assessment of systems thinking educational efforts. The definition was derived from a review of the systems thinking literature combined with the application of systems thinking to itself. Many different definitions of systems thinking can be found throughout the systems community, but key components of a singular definition can be distilled from the literature. This researcher considered these components both individually and holistically, then proposed a new definition of systems thinking that integrates these components as a system. The definition was tested for fidelity against a System Test and against three widely accepted system archetypes. Systems thinking is widely believed to be critical in handling the complexity facing the world in the coming decades; however, it still resides in the educational margins. In order for this important skill to receive mainstream educational attention, a complete definition is required. Such a definition has not yet been established. This research is an attempt to rectify this deficiency by providing such a definition.
Purpose – This paper seeks to identify the inhibitors and drivers of CSR implementation in fashion garment manufacturing from a supply chain management perspective, using a qualitative case study approach of 7 export garment manufacturers of varying size and business model in Sri Lanka. It suggests that adopting SCM principles supports CSR implementation in supplier facilities in global fashion garment supply chains by overcoming the negative effects of retail buying practices. This also progresses supplier CSR performance beyond that which is achievable via a coercive, compliance-based model by encouraging suppliers to be innovative and take ownership of the CSR agenda. Hence, aspects of supply chain relationship management may be more critical in progressing CSR implementation than traditional bureaucratic monitoring and auditing mechanisms.
In an industry sector facing unique pressure on cost as well as lead time, fashion retailers must understand how to align CSR implementation with the unique competitive challenges of the sector. Analysing the success of CSR implementation in the Sri Lankan export garment manufacturing industry enables managers to identify barriers and supporting factors to CSR implementation in global fashion supply chains.
Sustainability issues are particularly sensitive to the fashion supply chain, given current fierce competition, intensive resource use, and the exposure of penurious labour conditions in some regions.In this paper, we discuss how the sustainability movement is impacting the fashion retail supply chain organisation and its performance. We carried out a study with stakeholders of the fashion industry and we report on their views. We elaborate on the challenges and conflicts of the different dimensions of sustainability, and we discuss how to leverage both the internal and external organisations in the European supply chain.
Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives have sought to unravel the high complexities of sustainability. A mature understanding of sustainability management requires studies to adopt a multidisciplinary systemic lens capable of appreciating the interconnectivity of economic, political, social and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions. Yet the field of systems thinking in the context of sustainability management research is disparate and can benefit from a comprehensive review in order to assimilate the current fragmented body of research and to identify promising research directions. To address this gap, we conducted a review of the systems thinking and sustainability management literature from 1990 up to 2015 including 96 articles. In this review, we first present descriptives that show an emerging body of work rapidly growing since 2011. We found that 54 percent of articles were published in two transdisciplinary journals, demonstrating that a systemic approach is not yet prevalent in mainstream management journals. Second, we identify and describe the core theoretical concepts of systems thinking found in the literature including interconnections, feedbacks, adaptive capacity, emergence and self-organization. Third, findings show a number of research themes, including behavioral change, leadership, innovation, industrial ecology, social-ecological systems, transitions management, paradigm shifts and sustainability education. Finally we offer a cross-scale integrated framework of our findings, and conclude by identifying a number of promising research opportunities.
Despite substantial focus on sustainability issues in both science and politics, humanity remains on largely unsustainable development trajectories. Partly, this is due to the failure of sustainability science to engage with the root causes of unsustainability. Drawing on ideas by Donella Meadows, we argue that many sustainability interventions target highly tangible, but essentially weak, leverage points (i.e. using interventions that are easy, but have limited potential for transformational change). Thus, there is an urgent need to focus on less obvious but potentially far more powerful areas of intervention. We propose a research agenda inspired by systems thinking that focuses on transformational ‘sustainability interventions’, centred on three realms of leverage: reconnecting people to nature, restructuring institutions and rethinking how knowledge is created and used in pursuit of sustainability. The notion of leverage points has the potential to act as a boundary object for genuinely transformational sustainability science.
The advantages of using root cause analysis (RCA), a process designed for investigating the root causes of events with safety, health, environmental, quality, reliability and production impacts, are discussed. Root causes of a process help in developing effective recommendations. Root causes can be controlled by management and allow for generation of recommendations. RCA involves data collection, cause factor charting, root cause identification and recommendation generation and implementation. Identifying root causes is the key to preventing recurrences.
We qualitatively analysed how and why environmental improvement actions often lead to unintended environmental consequences. Different theories are integrated to delineate the underlying system structure causing this system behavior. Causal loop diagram technique is utilized to explore and visualize: how incremental improvements in material and energy efficiency can unintendedly cause consumption to increase; how this consumption rebound effect is linked to generation of waste and pollution; and how this can give rise to social and negative externalities, economic inequalities and other broad unintended consequences in our society. Consumption and incremental innovation are found to be the highest leverage points and reinforcing factors driving unintended environmental consequences in this complex system. The paper in addition explores two potential modes of behaviour dissimilar to those of unintended environmental consequences. These emerging modes of behaviour are product-service systems and environmental policy instruments. Their combination forms a prominent transition pathway from a production-consumption-dispose economy to a so-called circular economy.
In recent decades, the fast fashion industry has been characterized by widespread operations across both developing and developed countries. Due to the economic, social and environmental problems in developing countries, companies increasingly focus on sustainability and try to ensure the same quality and standards in working and production conditions throughout their supply chains. Although the tension in the exchange of resources between developing and developed countries lies at the heart of current sustainability activities, what these companies are actually doing to manage their supply chain has not yet been explored in depth in the literature. Drawing on the theoretical framework of Seuring and Müller (2008), the current study attempts to fill this void by conceptually mapping the current situation of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in the fast fashion industry by analysing reports from 9 companies that use the same reporting guidelines. The results of the study reveal that these companies focus significantly on supplier compliance with their code of conduct, employing further monitoring and auditing activities to prevent production problems in developing countries, improve overall supply chain performance and set sustainability criteria for their suppliers.
The integrative literature review is a distinctive form of research that generates new knowledge about the topic reviewed. Little guidance is available on how to write an integrative literature review. This article discusses how to organize and write an integrative literature review and cites examples of published integrative literature reviews that illustrate how this type of research has made substantive contributions to the knowledge base of human resource development.
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