Social sustainability practices and operations management: an empirical study of Italian equestrian centres

Abstract

Although implementing social sustainability practices surely affects the operations and supply chain management of the company very few researches in the field of OM and SCM have been dedicated to this topic. Grounding on the literature on social sustainability and looking at the context of equestrian centres, where activities related to Therapeutic Horseback Riding (THR) and other social sustainable practices are very common, this paper offers a number of theoretical argumentations and empirical analysis about how being social sustainability oriented (or just adopting one or few social sustainability practices) may affect the operations of a company and, in turn, influence firm’s performance.