This paper examines how independent remanufacturers (IRs) can properly orchestrate their capabilities and stakeholder relationships to achieve synergistic performance outcomes, namely improved economic profitability (EP) and carbon emissions reduction (CER), simultaneously.
Adopting a question-driven and abductive research design, we investigate the joint effects of capabilities and stakeholder relationships on IRs' performance outcomes. We first conduct in-depth interviews with senior executives of IRs, which inform us about configurational logic and construct selection. We then employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (fsQCA) to examine how different combinations of these factors collectively influence performance outcomes.
The results identify two configurations associated with high EP, in which technological capability, marketing capability, and relationships with customers, original equipment manufacturers, and governments consistently emerge as core conditions, and one configuration that generates high CER. Although the core conditions differ across outcomes, the fsQCA results reveal a common cross-domain pathway through which IRs can simultaneously achieve high EP and high CER.
The findings suggest that IRs should configure their capabilities and stakeholder relationships to simultaneously support economic viability and environmental sustainability, rather than focusing on isolated capabilities or single stakeholders. IRs should pursue coherent configurations that integrate technological, collection, and marketing capabilities with complementary stakeholder relationships; configurations lacking these critical elements may systematically lead to unfavorable outcomes.
It advances remanufacturing and operations management research by revealing the configurational mechanisms through which capabilities and stakeholder relationships jointly generate synergistic performance outcomes, and by identifying the conditions under which dual objectives can be achieved simultaneously in remanufacturing.
