ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts institutional and management choice perspectives and find strong evidence of the influence of both the institutional context and top management commitment on sustainable procurement practice. It provides a theoretical framework for understanding and differentiating organisational responses to sustainable procurement. The chapter develops a questionnaire, using established scales, which measures five sustainability impacts: the natural environment, diversity, human rights, philanthropy and employee safety. It makes a contribution to sustainable operations management debates internationally concerned with how management strategies can best support the sustainability agenda, by illuminating how both institutional context and top management commitment can greatly influence public sector buyers to adopt sustainable procurement practices. The chapter discusses the character of these frameworks for countries relevant to the subsequent empirical analysis, including the United States (US) and Canada and countries in the European Union (EU). It describes the theoretical approach to the study, and covers the institutional and managerial choice views, along with sustainable procurement.
