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Essays on Social Sustainability in Operations Management

Chu, Soh Hyun
http://orcid.org/0002-9537-1220-
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1713372218389527

Abstract Details

2024, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Business Administration.
This dissertation centers on exploring social sustainability, the human and societal elements of sustainability, in operations management. In the first essay, I particularly focus on the health and safety dimension in the context of warehouse operations. I study how managers can jointly promote safety and completion time through managerial implementations such as performance feedback and best practice sharing. I adopt a time and motion laboratory experiment, where safety is measured as a reduction of musculoskeletal disorder risk, captured through markerless motion capture technology. My findings suggest that the tradeoff between safety and completion time can be mitigated even in the presence of time-specific priorities. In the second essay, I expand my research scope to various dimensions of social misconduct, such as forced labor, child labor, discrimination, harassment, violations of health and safety, and wage working hour conditions. I empirically explore whether news articles on each social misconduct dimension negatively impact the firm market value. Text mining is applied to classify the articles published from 1990 to 2019 on social misconduct within publicly traded firms and their supply chains. I find that the magnitude and the significance of the impact of social misconduct differ across dimensions and whether it occurs at the focal firm or the supply chain. While the effect is overall short-lived, my findings hint that policies geared toward specific social misconduct may mitigate its loss of penalization. Finally, in the third essay, I conduct a literature review on corporate social responsibility and sustainability, to distinguish social sustainability as an independent domain. This work is motivated by studies often mixing social sustainability with other close concepts such as corporate social responsibility. I suggest that recognizing the unique domain of social sustainability would facilitate future scholars’ contributions to this research in operations management. Overall, my dissertation posits that social sustainability may be promoted more effectively, given the right structure, process, and acknowledgment.
James Hill (Advisor)
Elliot Bendoly (Committee Member)
Christian Blanco (Committee Member)
113 p.
Business Administration
social sustainability, operations management, tradeoff, supply chain, laboratory experiment, text analysis

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Chu, S. H. (2024). Essays on Social Sustainability in Operations Management [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1713372218389527

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Chu, Soh Hyun. Essays on Social Sustainability in Operations Management. 2024. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1713372218389527.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Chu, Soh Hyun. "Essays on Social Sustainability in Operations Management." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2024. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1713372218389527

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1713372218389527
92
© 2024, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Essays on Social Sustainability in Operations Management by Soh Hyun Chu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.