Turning Point. Getting their Wings: Angel Agents Live On -Supplier Stewards in Sustainable Enterprise

This ‘turning point’ highlights stewardship theory as an underused but highly applicable behavioural organisational theory to explain and enhance sustainable supply chain management practices. By partly rejecting well accepted agency forms of governance mechanisms, the recommendation to investigate stewardship theory as a way to explain our observations in sustainable operations is encouraged. Future research demonstrating and supporting the use of angel agents will be both provocative and engaging by evidencing the removal of the control mechanisms many see as a necessity in principal-agent relationships. For academics and practioners, adapting theory for modern contexts such as sustainable development, is an important requirement to tackle new challenges. Identifying examples of stewardship theory in buyer-supplier exchanges, which are typically emblematic of a principal-agent approach, is under researched but conspicuous enough to be the subject of empirical and theoretical studies.