Implementation of sustainability in the food and catering supply chains of
      UK HE institutions
Creators: name: Sayed, Maysara
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2016

description: Both organisations and customers are becoming more aware of the current
      economic, environmental and social challenges that the world faces today.
      In this context, it can be argued that universities are amongst the most
      important organisations that could contribute effectively in
      sustainability development in any society through producing and teaching
      sustainability related knowledge. This puts an ethical obligation upon
      these organisations to introduce and implement sustainability within their
      premises and operations. The procurement function is one of the main
      functions that can contribute effectively in the overall sustainability
      agenda of any university due to the large variety of products and services
      that this type of organisation procures and the related supply chain
      issues that they manage. However, the extant literature on Sustainability
      in Higher Education (SHE) suffers from a significant dearth of studies
      that specifically address Sustainable Procurement (SP) and Sustainable
      Supply Chain Management (SSCM) in universities. Thus, this thesis
      contributes to filling this particular gap through conducting exploratory
      research in order to investigate the implementation of SP initiatives in
      the current buying practices of UK based HE Institutions (Universities)
      and their supply chains, with a particular focus on the food and catering
      procurement area.
      
      This thesis, therefore, has two main overarching research questions, which
      are: “How are sustainability issues incorporated into the current food and
      catering procurement practices of UK based HE Institutions?” and “How are
      food and catering SP practices extended to multiple actors and multiple
      tiers across the existing supply chains of UK based HE Institutions?”.
      These two questions have been answered through three inter-related papers
      that tackle the following three topics: the implementation of SP
      initiatives through different implementation modes employed by
      universities (i.e., in-house catering vs outsourced catering); local
      sourcing as one of the main sustainability initiatives within
      universities’ sustainability agendas; and the impact of institutional
      pluralism on the implementation of sustainability initiatives within the
      university food and catering supply chain. The thesis uses three
      well-established theoretical lenses, (i.e., Transaction Cost Economics,
      Legitimacy Theory, and Institutional Theory), in the three papers
      respectively.
      
      Beside their own findings and contributions, the three papers collectively
      provide important contributions to both the SHE literature and the SSCM
      literature. In terms of the SHE literature, they: provide insights into
      the implementation of SP in HE institutions and their food supply chains;
      compensate for the dearth of studies on SSCM in HE; and enhance the
      theoretical authentication of the SHE literature. In terms of the SSCM
      literature, they: provide a new context for three theories; include a real
      supply chain perspective by including multiple tiers in the data
      collection and analysis; include the TBL in studying SSCM; and provided a
      theoretical generalisation of the results for the wider SSCM context.