Despite decades of research on ethics and sustainability, supply chains continue to exhibit persistent unethical behaviour including forced labour, inadequate working conditions, and gaps between corporate commitments and actual practices. Rather than treating unethical conduct as a compliance problem to be solved through better auditing and codes, this special issue seeks to understand the structural and systemic conditions that make unethical decisions rational and routine within supply chains.
The special issue addresses contemporary challenges including new regulatory requirements such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, rapid adoption of artificial intelligence in procurement and logistics, geopolitical fragmentation reshaping global sourcing, and organisational environments where ethical choices are often more costly than unethical alternatives. The collection brings together scholars from operations management, business ethics, technology management, and organisation theory to examine the causal mechanisms underlying persistent unethical behaviour.