Stakeholders sustainability demands: an analysis of the automotive and auto parts global value chain in a developing country

AMATO, CELINA NOÉ

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; SASE 2023 Annual meeting; 2023

Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics

Sustainability is understood as the balanced -or tensioned- realization of a company’s economic, social and environmental goals, or the relationship established by an organization with society and the environment (Bansal and Song, 2017), whose basis is the three-dimensionality known as ‘triple bottom line’ (Elkington, 2004). Sustainability can be analyzed throughout the global value chains (GVC) in which academics show special interest in order to understand the mechanisms used by the stakeholders (Bair et al., 2013; Dallas et al., 2019) to influence the sustainability criteria adoption (Boström et al., 2015; Bush et al., 2015; Seuring and Müller, 2008).Generally, GVC stakeholders agree on explicit and formal sustainability standards and certifications, as well as informal conventions and good practices (Nadvi, 2008; Ponte and Gibbon, 2005), creating public and private mechanisms, which determine valid criteria to promote sustainable practices throughout the GVC.But, since leading companies have focused their activities on brand design, marketing and management, low-qualified manufacturing activities were outsourced to emerging countries causing undesired effects on the global production system. So, several stakeholders exerted pressure towards GVC to include sustainability criteria beyond their national borders (Boström et al., 2015). The automotive-auto parts industry constitutes an interesting GVC to analyze, not only due to the economic and political impact that this chain has in developing countries but also due to the creation and dissemination of innovation, added value, employment and production linkages towards the economies, in addition to the inclusion of many SME which is particularly important in developing countries (Baruj et al., 2017; Panigo et al., 2017; Stumpo and Rivas, 2013).There are antecedents that analyze the automotive and/or auto parts industry from the GVC framework (e.g. Humphrey, 2003; Humphrey and Memedovic, 2003; Lorentzen and Barnes, 2004; Pavlínek and Ženka, 2011; Ray and Miglani, 2018; Sturgeon and Van Biesebroeck, 2011), very few of these have a focus on emerging countries (Ray and Miglani, 2018) and even fewer concentrate on South and Central America (De Marchi et al., 2020). Furthermore, there are analysis carried out from other approaches on these industries in Argentina (e.g. Baruj et al., 2017; McDermott and Corredoira, 2010; Panigo et al., 2017; Sessa, 2013; Sica et al., 2012; Stumpo and Rivas, 2013). None of these emphasizes the sustainability demands of the stakeholders from a developing country perspective, and the relation between presence of sustainability criteria and stakeholders demands.So, the aim of this work is to analyze the sustainability demands of a broader range of stakeholders from the automotive-auto parts GVC in Argentina, in order to understand the the presence of sustainability criteria associated with some stakeholders demands and the mechanisms used by them to influence the sustainability criteria in the GVC.To address this goal, a qualitative methodology was chosen (Stake, 2005; Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 1989). For data collection, the methods were key informant interviews and documentary review. The data collected was analyzed following a series of stages recommended by the methodology (Miles and Huberman, 1984; Taylor and Bogdan, 1998), assisted by ATLAS®ti software.