انتخاب تامین کننده پایدار در محیط فاز شهودی: یک دیدگاه از منظر تصمیم گیری Sustainable Supplier Selection in Intuitionistic Fuzzy Environment: A Decision Making Perspective

1. Background The concept of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is to integrate economic and social thinking along with environmental awareness into the traditional supply chain management. The sustainability in supply chain comes into existence right from the product design and development to the material selection, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, warehousing, distribution, consumption, return, and disposal (Linton et al. 2007; Walker et al., 2008; Chu et al., 2009; Büyüközkan and Çifçi, 2011). Supplier selection is an important assignment in industrial context to attain the preferred level of quality and quantity at the reasonable cost of desired raw/finished material with on-time delivery. Suppliers are the dealers who provide raw materials, components and after sales service that an organization cannot self-give (Kuo et al., 2011). Earlier, in traditional supply chain management, quality, cost, and delivery were considered as common and frequently used criteria for potential supplier selection; whereas, in sustainable supply chain management, economic, social, and environmental sustainability criteria need to be considered simultaneously because they allow an organization to achieve long term economic viability and position sustainability within the broader rubric of supply chain management in sustainability perspective (Carter and Rogers, 2008). In traditional supply chain construct, social sustainability factors have not been considered yet (i.e. before 2009); however, many authors have included environmental aspects on the traditional supply chain to make it ‘green’ and to reduce the anti-environmental effects up to a certain limit (Handfield et al., 2002; Humphreys et al., 2003; Lee et al., 2009). Afterwards, the existence of green supply chain and green supplier selection have still been a need of an obligation to incorporate social sustainability factors into the entire process of green supply chain management. In order to achieve a sustainable supply chain, all of the chain members from suppliers to top managers must have affinity with sustainability (Amindoust et al., 2012). Sustainable development and sustainability are frequently interpreted as a synthesis of economic, environmental and social development well known as a triple-bottom-line approach (Gauthier, 2005). Sustainability has been a major concern for organizations as awareness about environmental degradation, natural resource depletion and climate change has increased considerably. In addition, voices raised by social organizations on various social and environmental issues in developing countries have forced organizations to focus on sustainable manufacturing practices (Mani, 2014). Hence, the study of sustainable supply chain management has gained immense momentum during past two decades. Although the studies focus on three pillars of sustainability viz. economic (profit), environment (planet) and social (people); the social aspect has not been explored much due to the “humanness” and the difficulty in getting tangible outcomes from it (Elkington, 1998; Carter and Easton, 2011; Ashby et al.2012; Mani et al. 2014).