Sustainability in global production networks – introducing the notion of extended supplier networks

Research considering globalized production as taking place within global production networks and global value chains has potential to provide insights into the challenges of sustainable production. However, studies employing these approaches to look at manufactured products have often concentrated on connections between lead buyers and upper tier suppliers and given insufficient attention to exploring interactions across all stages of production. In this article, the concept of extended supplier networks is introduced to address this gap by explicitly looking at how all stages of production are connected. The extended supplier network model that is presented provides an analytical framework that enables multiple scales of analysis in the study of sustainability challenges.