Background:         

Business in the twenty-first century is characterized by tremendous technological improvements, globe-spanning supply chains and an increased sustainability awareness. In recent times, organizations began to broaden their horizons beyond economic gains and started to incorporate new procedures to improve their social and environmental sustainability performance. However, only few researchers previously investigated how the digitalization of supply chains can support this endeavor.

Purpose:                 

The purpose of this thesis is to generate new theory for digitalization-enabled supply chain sustainability. The aim is to investigate drivers for digitalization and to establish an understanding of how digitalization affects the sustainability of supply chains.

Method:                 

This thesis encompasses a relativist ontology and a constructionist epistemology. Within the frame of these philosophical assumptions, the research follows an inductive approach with exploratory characteristics. The research method is based on a multiple case study design, consisting of 10 cases. Each case represents a company that is involved with digitalization or supply chain management. The findings are gathered from semi-structured interviews that were transcribed and analyzed through thematic analysis to find overarching similarities within the cases.

Conclusion:   

The results show that a variety of external and internal factors are driving and hindering companies to pursue a digitalization strategy. Furthermore, digitalization changes the way supply chains are operated and induces various positive effects on the environmental and economic sustainability performance of supply chains. The effects on the social dimension of sustainability are positive but also negative.