1. Introduction
The textile and apparel industry, which ranks among the world’s most polluting sectors [
1], has historically been among the first to enter less-developed countries due to its labour-intensive character [
2]. This results in a highly globalised industry, with complex supply chains (SCs) shaped by the combination of transnational outsourcing and the relocation of activities by focal companies—those playing pivotal roles in the SC—with many SC actors (mainly upstream suppliers) located in developing countries [
3,
4]. Additionally, the characteristics of the fast-fashion business model—high volume, rapid lead times, and low prices [
5]—adds criticality to the sustainability challenges associated with the sector [
1]. Thus, fast-fashion SCs are potential vehicles for the development of upstream producers and the introduction of industrial improvements to local communities [
2], but are also at risk of generating sustainability issues related to social and environmental breaches [
6,
7].
This situation, augmented by social pressures to enhance Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), has forced fast-fashion companies to accelerate their search for sustainability—i.e., the confluence of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions, such that no dimension is compromised for the benefit of the others, as per Elkington’s triple bottom line (TBL) concept [
8]. CSR is defined as “the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society” [
9] (p. 6), and is particularly requested from:
focal companies, due to their large size, global brands, media visibility, and reliance on demanding institutional investors based in developed countries; and/or
industries with large economic, social, and environmental impacts [
10,
11,
12].
This places retailers in fast-fashion SCs at the centre of the spotlight of social pressure.
The European Union (EU) points out that in order “to fully meet their corporate social responsibility, enterprises should have in place a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights, and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders” [
9] (p. 6). To this end, sustainability reporting is not only the most important accountability tool allowing stakeholders and companies to report their social and environmental risks and policies [
13], but also a crucial one for decision makers balancing the TBL [
14,
15]. Therefore, CSR and sustainability reporting has grown considerably in the apparel and fast-fashion industry [
15].
However, firms’ adoption of standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has increased alongside criticisms of the limitations of these standards in terms of actually enhancing sustainability in SCs [
16]. Sustainability reporting has been broadly attacked as “greenwashing” [
13,
17], or corporate rhetoric lacking consistency between talk and action [
18]. The primary interpretations for this apparent gap are paradoxical. On one hand, it has been argued that compliance with overly closed sustainability standards boils down to an annual “tick the box” ritual that ignores local and industry conditions [
19]. On the other hand, standards that do not require firms to report concrete information about their actions and, thus, offer only vague assertions decoupled from business practices, have been criticised as too open [
20].
All in all, the gap between sustainability reporting and sustainability practice is particularly worrisome in sectors that rely heavily on global SCs, as is the case in the fast-fashion industry. Furthermore, since apparel and fast-fashion SCs currently employ millions of workers—especially young women—worldwide, there is an urgent need to leverage their developing power for local producers, communities, and the environment, as well as reverse the negative impacts of their growth: that is, to create sustainable value within and beyond company and SC boundaries. This is the ultimate goal of this work, which relies on the potential of effective sustainability reporting. Specifically, we present a universal disclosure framework that aims to:
Move beyond reporting towards action;
Move beyond financial performance towards sustainable value creation; and
Move beyond corporate boundaries towards value creation for the broader SC ecosystem.
By building on sustainable value creation and collective impact approaches, this integrative framework provides a common agenda for sustainability in the fast-fashion industry. To this end, we adopt the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the universally shared soft regulations that balance the three dimensions of TBL, uniting all countries, actors, and stakeholders—i.e., the broad SC ecosystem—around a common objective [
21].
The article is structured as follows. We start by describing the structure of fast-fashion SCs and analysing the potential of the sustainable value creation and collective impact approaches to solve or leverage the sustainability challenges and opportunities of complex global SCs. We then discuss the limitations of mainstream reporting, and substantiate the potential utility of disclosure frameworks and practice-oriented and industry-relevant tools for sustainability. This discussion leads to our research objectives. In the Methods and Data Analysis section, we introduce the sample companies and their reporting instruments, and discuss the key concepts to be integrated into the proposed framework. We then explain the steps taken to carry out the content analysis. Subsequently, by building on the discussion of the findings, we present the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ (SS) as the common agenda for sustainability in the fast-fashion industry. Finally, we outline the main conclusions and limitations of the study.
2. Literature Review
2.1. Complex SCs in the Fast-Fashion Industry
The fast-fashion industry, while endowed with enormous potential and responsibility related to the development of countries participating in its complex SCs, is also associated with high-risk activities along social and environmental dimensions. For example, workplaces and working conditions sometimes borderline human rights violations, and production methods often involve high levels of pollution and contamination [
1,
22,
23].
The risk of fast-fashion activities is associated with the behaviour of both firms and customers [
24]. Companies are compelled to adapt their processes and structures to survive in a market of immediate demands and cheap prices [
25,
26], which can involve endangering labour practices that violate human rights. Meanwhile, responsible environmental management requires the reduction of environmental impacts (e.g., boosting transportation emissions and reducing the use of water and water pollution) [
26,
27]. Customers support a SC ecosystem that encourages disposability, with the subsequent societal and environmental challenges [
28].
Of the many definitions and formulas for fast-fashion [
29], this paper follows the one proposed by Caro and Martínez-de-Albéniz [
5], who describe fast-fashion as a specific business model that combines three elements: (i) quick responses; (ii) frequent assortment changes; and (iii) fashionable designs at affordable prices [
5].
From the above, it follows that fast-fashion SCs tend to adopt the following structure, comprising two main types of actors and activities:
Downstream activities: activities carried out by retailers acting as focal companies that are characterised by high competition (prices and speed), high volume, and high visibility.
Upstream activities: activities carried out by suppliers following focal companies’ demands that are characterised by high dynamism (and pressure), high volume, labour intensiveness, social complexity, the geographical dispersion and fragmentation of production, high levels of pollution and contamination, and generally low profit margins.
The consequence of this dual structure is twofold. On one hand, the retailers (focal companies) lose direct control over upstream activities, while remaining fully responsible for their product/service lifecycles [
11]. On the other hand, it results in frequent trade-off situations among the three dimensions of sustainability and the different actors of fast-fashion SCs, within and beyond corporate boundaries [
24]. Using a case study of the fast-fashion retailer H&M, Shen [
24] points out that these conflicts appear at each stage of the SC, “including material production, garment manufacturing, transportation/distribution, consumer education, and retailing” [
24] (p. 6237). They may come from sourcing managers’ decisions to produce in countries with low levels of human well-being despite the higher carbon emissions [
24], from product returns being part of the customer value strategy [
30] or from the trade-offs between clean technology and technology investment [
31], to cite only a few. Therefore, fast-fashion SCs’ focal companies will seek to manage the SCs and maximise the positive impacts of activities relating to the products they commercialise, while minimising (and ideally neutralising or even reversing) any negative effects for any related actor.
The situation in which (i) one individual company (focal company) is responsible for all the activities contributing to the product that the enterprise commercialises; and (ii) each individual company may belong to several SCs, leads us to explore sustainable value creation and collective impact approaches.
2.2. Fast-Fashion Industry Sustainable Value Creation and Collective Impact
The first element listed above relates to the asymmetry typical of fast-fashion SCs, in which the focal company is declared responsible for the whole set of activities and is assumed to be the strongest link (in terms of resources). This privileged position is a double-edged sword, since anything that happens in relation to a focal company’s products will be blamed on that enterprise. Who, then, is the weakest link? The answer to this question is not straightforward, and indicates that solving any SC challenge will benefit all of the ecosystem’s actors, which in turn get implicated in its solution. In this way, it demands a ‘sustainable value creation’ (‘co-creation’ or ‘shared value creation’) approach [
32,
33,
34] where efforts are placed “on exploring how to create the value that benefits multiple stakeholders, including the environment and society, but not without sacrificing shareholders’ benefits.” [
35] (p. 2). In line with Yang et al. [
35], we put the focus on the entire SC. Therefore, in the context of fast-fashion, such sustainable value creation can be defined as the generation of value for all of the actors in the SC, the communities, and the environment in which the firm operates, without compromising the focal firm’s benefits.
The second element—that is, the fact that every company operating in the fast-fashion industry belongs to many different SCs—anticipates that different companies will share similar concerns, objectives, and actors. This gives meaning to our search for ‘collective impact’, which is defined as “the commitment of a group of important actors from different sectors [in our context: SCs] to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem” [
36] (p. 36). We argue that there is no other way to reach the ambitious goal of sustainability. Even more, we can even expect synergetic effects of shared value and collective impact approaches: “to advance shared value efforts, therefore, businesses must foster and participate in multi-sector coalitions, and for that, they need a new framework. Governments, NGOs, companies, and community members all have essential roles to play, yet they work more often in opposition than in alignment.” [
37] (p. 4).
2.3. From Sustainability Reporting to Effective Disclosure
Sustainability reporting standards seek to enhance SC sustainability, transparency, and value creation in practice. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the most widely used sustainability reporting guidelines worldwide, states that “sustainability reporting helps organisations to set goals, measure performance, and manage change in order to make their operations more sustainable. A sustainability report conveys disclosures on an organisation’s impacts—be they positive or negative—on the environment, society, and the economy” [
15] (p. 380). Modern sustainability reporting has evolved into Integrated Reporting (IR), which can be defined as “a concise communication about how an organization’s strategy, governance, performance, and prospects, in the context of its external environment, lead to the creation of value over the short, medium, and long term.” Its vision is to “align capital allocation and corporate behaviour to wider goals of financial stability and sustainable development.” [
38]. Both GRI and IR adopt the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the universally shared soft regulations that balance the three dimensions of TBL, uniting all countries, actors and stakeholders—i.e., the broad SC ecosystem—around a common objective [
21,
38,
39].
However, even the most recently developed IR initiatives are criticised for their inability to move beyond communication. IR has not yet shown its ability to effectively contribute to corporate sustainability [
16], and this gap has led some researchers to brand the approach a failure [
40].
Does this widespread scepticism concerning the potential of sustainability and integrated reporting mean that the effort to ensure its effectiveness is meaningless? The conventional assumption that CSR communication opposes CSR action, and that the talk–action gap hampers sustainability, has been challenged by the research tradition that regards communication as performative [
41]. Christensen, Morsing, and Thyssen [
42] argue that this gap has the potential to stimulate improvements in CSR. CSR statements reflect not only the current state of managerial practice, but also aspirations and visions for a (presumably) better future state. Schultz et al. [
43] oppose the prevailing instrumental and political-normative views on CSR, and promote the communication view of CSR instead. This latter perspective argues that “CSR is a matter not only of legal liability, brand value, or social connectedness, but also of communicative connectedness between organisations, media, and stakeholders” [
43] (p. 689). CSR derives from more than simply multiple social relations: it is communicatively constituted in complex and dynamic networks. Thus, responsibility is not achieved in corporate spheres separate from society, but rather, it is co-constructed in de-centralised networks where knowledge about the meaning and expectations of CSR is organised and negotiated.
We further argue that sustainability and integrated reporting is crippled by its origin in financial reporting, which is understood as a “detailed periodic account of a company’s activities, financial condition, and prospects that is made available to shareholders and investors” [
44] (p. 178). Even in approaches integrating non-financial dimensions of performance, reporting is built on the concept of a company unilaterally producing and making information accessible about itself. In a networked society, however, revelations of new information about how companies consider ethical, social, and environmental impacts do not depend on views originating from instrumental corporate reports or consensual reporting standards, but rather, tend to emerge from the dialogue, conflict, or dissent of multiple voices. Along this line of thought, we integrate the concept of disclosure—that is, “the revelation of information that was previously secret or unknown” [
44] (p. 178)—into the field of sustainability. Sustainability disclosure is effective to the extent that it reveals new information, regardless of origin, that provides incentives for action to the focal firm, other SC actors, stakeholders outside the SC, or stakeseekers—i.e., those beyond established stakeholders claiming to have a stake in a corporation’s decision making [
45]. From this perspective, standards and frameworks are no longer considered just technical compliance tools; rather, they become agents of change, stimulating the questioning and constructive criticism of corporate practices [
46].
2.4. Research Objectives
Thus, building on the sustainable value creation and collective impact approaches, and assuming that disclosure tools are agents of change, this paper argues that the complex problem of SC sustainability can only be tackled if a common agenda for the sector is co-constructed. Based on the discussion of CSR and sustainability literature, and on the insights from the previous experience of one of the authors as a practitioner in the fast-fashion industry, the ultimate purpose of the study—creating sustainable value through effective disclosure—is decoupled in a twofold objective:
Objective 1: To draw a comprehensive map of the sustainability challenges for fast-fashion SCs (Objective 1.a.) and analyse current fast-fashion industry actions in pursuit of sustainability (Objective 1.b.).
Objective 2: To propose a universal action-oriented tool for the fast-fashion industry that, with TBL disclosure, assists in creating sustainable value for the whole SC ecosystem.
This universal disclosure tool would constitute a common agenda towards sustainable value creation in the fast-fashion industry.
5. Action-Oriented Disclosure Tool Proposal
The results described in the previous section clearly reinforce the second objective of this paper:
Objective 2: To propose a universal action-oriented tool for the fast-fashion industry that assists TBL disclosure in creating sustainable value for the whole SC ecosystem.
Thus, building on the results of the content analysis and in combination with our discussion of the academic literature and the insights and experience of the fast-fashion practitioner, we worked towards constructing a disclosure tool that could ensure that:
The CMIs were complemented with the absent material issues, i.e., those issues not currently being reported, but found to be key for the wider fast-fashion industry ecosystem.
The RASs were contrasted with the SDGs and the CMIs to ensure that they:
The key actors actively involved in the implementation of the RASs were shortlisted in order to identify and push all of the relevant ecosystem actors towards a common goal.
Our action-oriented disclosure tool aims to facilitate the revelation of information on sustainability actions to help SC actors, stakeholders, and stakeseekers understand how sustainability is managed in practice in complex SCs in the fast-fashion industry, as well as to promote actions towards improving such practices.
Weighing its pros and cons, we decided to root our tool in the architecture of the Balanced Score Card (BSC) and the Sustainability Balanced Score Card (SBSC) [
59,
60,
61]. The rational was to leverage its benefits as an interactive system for integrated sustainability management [
59,
61] that “helps significantly to overcome the shortcomings of the often parallel approaches of environmental, social, and economic management systems implemented in the past” [
59] (p. 283). We overcome its main critique of not contributing to sustainable development [
62] with our focus on actions and the direct link to the SDGs.
To adapt the SBSC architecture to our objective, we moved the traditional business unit focus to a system level that analyses the fast-fashion SC’s wider ecosystem, thus taking a multiple stakeholders’ view [
63]. Consequently, in order to not contradict the founders of the original BSC [
61], we removed the word ‘balanced’ from our disclosure tool and named it the Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard.
Our Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard (
Figure 6) is an action-oriented disclosure framework comprising the five analysed elements that were revealed to be key to fast-fashion sustainability:
SDGs: The universal framework containing the broader and widely accepted sustainability goals. The 17 goals are grouped into three levels of urgency (Critical Relevance, Priority, and Ensure Compliance) inspired by previous BSC and SBSC architectures [
59,
63] according to their relevance to the fast-fashion industry (extracted from our previous analysis; see
Table 3). By forcing companies to report on all goals (to at least a minimum compliance level), we avoid the possibility of orphan issues or easy-to-solve problem biases.
CMIs: The concrete issues already reported by fast-fashion retailers. By disclosing the CMIs in a common framework that relates them to the other categories in the Sustainability Scorecard, we make it difficult for disclosing companies to leave any issue unaddressed and prevent retailers from reporting on accessory issues.
RAS Topics: The particular questions retailers report that they are already actively tackling. By disclosing these in a common framework and relating them to the other categories in the Sustainability Scorecard, we make it difficult for disclosing companies to act on irrelevant questions and easier for them to compare and team up with peers in the sector.
RAS Instruments: The strategies, policies, and practices that retailers report that they are already using to cover their RMIs. Publicly disclosing these makes it more difficult for companies to communicate only green-washing practices or other mechanisms that are far from action. Such disclosure also facilitates a sector-wide comparison and analysis to identify the most useful instruments.
Actors Involved: The players already reported as participating in the execution of the RASs. By shortlisting these actors, we call out all actors in the wider fast-fashion ecosystem and empower relevant partners to pursue a common goal.
The Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard, which was conceived as a public and interactive tool, constitutes the co-constructed common agenda to foster sustainable value creation in the industry. Its main contributions are detailed in the following section.
6. Discussion and Final Conclusions
Current sustainability and integrated reporting frameworks have sought to develop common standards and measurement tools to allow companies to communicate their performance regarding material issues in relation to a range of indicators [
15,
64]. However, these tools’ potential for practice has yet to be fulfilled. Our ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ addresses the call of the communication view of CSR to construct an action-oriented, networked disclosure approach capable of enacting sustainable transformation in and beyond global and/or complex SCs [
43].
Within the fast-fashion industry, too much time and effort and too many resources have been devoted to identifying impacts that are nearly identical for all industry actors and are universally clustered around the SDGs. With respect to the disclosure of relevant information that was “previously secret or unknown” [
44] (p. 178), it is necessary to discontinue this expenditure and instead invest in solutions, which are currently very weak and fail to point to core business activities. Only by focussing our efforts on building and disclosing concrete actions towards sustainable supply chains, can we exploit sustainability-related challenges and opportunities. Those concrete actions can be contrasted and discussed among stakeholders and eventually become best practices. However, many of the actions that retailers report thus far are vague, uncertain, and projected too far into the future.
We agree on the potential of standards and frameworks as agents of change that stimulate the constructive criticism of corporate practices, but argue that in order to achieve effective sustainability disclosure with an impact beyond investors and organisations’ financial performance, it is more relevant to share timely and detailed information on how companies are tackling key industry-specific concerns. We apply the main lessons learnt from previous experience, our content analysis, and the literature to propose a new approach that does not change the universal framework for the impacts (SDGs). On the contrary: it explores concrete ways to manage the SDGs and compel companies to disclose them in ways that reveal and communicate how risks and opportunities are being tackled, which in turn allows these risks to be minimised and industry opportunities to be exploited. In sum, by focusing on actions instead of impacts and relating actions to SDGs and SC and non-SC actors, this paper builds a universal disclosure framework—the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’—which allows for interactive, timely, and dynamic information sharing, and offers several contributions that are discussed below in line with previous relevant literature.
It specifically covers the challenges of the fast-fashion industry (
Figure 6), allowing for comparability and synergetic actions alongside contributions to the impact of SDGs. Fritz et al. defended a similar approach for the electronics and automotive industry. Their work suggested a list of 36 industry-specific-SDG related aspects that allow companies “to prioritise, measure, and monitor their own sustainability performance over time, as well as the one of their entire SC and to address stakeholders’ expectations” [
64] (p. 600). The originality of our study is that, after identifying SDG-related aspects for the fast-fashion industry, we applied the same logic to the reported actions towards sustainability, thus helping disclosure take a step forward, towards practice. This orientation to immediate action distinguishes our research from Turker and Altuntas’ analysis of fast-fashion corporate reports, whose comprehensive conceptual map of Sustainable Supply Chain Management approaches remains at a theoretical level [
27].
It focusses on immediate solutions and actions, including the topics, instruments (strategies, policies, and practices), and actors needed to deploy them. For example, rather than publishing, with a lapse of one and a half years, the percentage of CO
2 reductions coming from stores (impacts), the proposed ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ facilitates the identification and exchange of solutions to tackle concerns related to “climate, energy and greenhouse gases (GHG)” (instruments). In this way, we hope to contribute to the need for a “greater emphasis in disclosures related to what apparel brands are doing to find better ways of doing things”, as pointed out by Kozlowski et al. [
15] (p. 392).
It integrates the focal company with other relevant actors in the SC and beyond. For instance, it smoothens the process used to detect and team up with key partners within or outside the SC for each activity or issue to be tackled. This would have a direct contribution to sustainability, as anticipated in the works of Li et al. [
26] and Hansen and Schaltegger [
63]. In the first study, the authors verified collaborations between suppliers, industries, and NGOs as true enablers of SC sustainability. In the second, Li et al. point out that “collaboration among all stakeholders will normally guarantee an increase in the level of sustainable performance in the global marketplace.” [
26] (p. 834).
In trying to avoid the reporting company being the one that decides “which kind of information to disclose and how to deepen the narrative” [
13] (p. 5), our scorecard facilitates the revelation of new information on the gap between sustainability goals and material issues, on one hand, and sustainability actions and instruments, on the other. In other words, it helps to identify orphan material issues so that they can be appropriately addressed. For instance, our analysis reveals a big gap between the potential of innovation in terms of sustainability and the number of actions reported on it. As shown in
Figure 4, innovation is revealed as the most material issue in the Fast-Fashion Common Materiality Matrix. However,
Table 6 reveals that only 3.54% of the analysed RASs turn to Innovation (under the ‘Innovation and Technology’ instrument) as the instrument for action. This opens up the floor for stakeholders’ demands to focal companies to align their sustainability investments (and disclosure) with the real needs and potential of the broader SC ecosystem. Additionally, following Fritz et al. [
64] (p. 600), if the scorecard is pushed by SC actors different from the focal firm, “the risk to report only on good performance aspects would be even better addressed”.
If retailers allow the scorecard to be interactive, all of the actors related to a particular goal or action can report on and monitor it in almost real-time. As pointed out by Yang et al. [
35], fostering SC actors to exchange information would create sustainable value and improve business operations. In this way, the scorecard can also be used to control involuntary disclosure—“what stakeholders and stakeseekers disclose about an organisation” [
65] (p. 30)—in two ways. The scorecard can firstly prevent the dissemination of inaccurate or false information from outside a company, and secondly, facilitate an awareness of and reactions to key concerns from other companies and related actors, stakeholders, and stakeseekers. Companies can use our scorecard as a hedging tool against false declarations, and as an opportunity pool for proactively integrating and canalizing external information from stakeholders and stakeseekers.
It supports the social enforcement, thereby overcoming the critique of lack of normative enforcement that exists in current reporting norms [
40]. When reporting on particular and tangible issues that people can understand and see, everyone becomes capable of auditing the degree of execution of an action and claiming responsibility. A simple but clear example is that, although customers might not be able to measure the CO
2 in a store, they can report on (and act against) retailers irrationally using the air-conditioning system on shop floors at 15 °C in summer time.
Finally, our scorecard broadens the grounds for finding best practices, by focussing not on CMIs, but rather on uncovering as many different actions (topics, instruments, and operative actors) as possible. The aim is to compel companies to ‘compete’ in the TBL, thereby adding goals such as ‘I want the best partners for sustainability’ or ‘I want the most comfortable climatisation systems for the workers in the factories’ to already existing goals, such as ‘I want the best IT system’ or ‘I want the highest turnover growth’.
Businesses and SCs can use the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ to understand and design corporate actions to help alleviate poverty, address climate change, protect human rights, or prevent worker exploitation, thereby encouraging the implementation and commitment of new actions, tools, and actors. UN Global Compact has called for the use of instruments that increase SDG adoption and implementation. The present scorecard addresses this call by aligning CMIs currently reported in fast-fashion with the 17 SDGs, and then examining sustainability-oriented business practices (i.e., real actions in cooperation with SC actors and stakeholders). As described before, our proposed ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ aims to transform compliance tools into agents of change [
46].
This study’s main limitations concern its reliance on the analysis of contents voluntarily disseminated by companies (i.e., the materiality matrices and corporate reports). However, we believe that this methodological limitation should not negate the significance and potential utility of the proposed framework to foster sustainability in practice. On one hand, it could be argued that stakeholders’ views are indirectly reflected in the materiality matrix; on the other hand, our scorecard can help stakeseekers [
45] uncover new information and position concrete new topics, actions, and instruments within the corporate agenda. In fact, voluntary reports are only the starting point for the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ as a collaborative disclosure mechanism that aims to uncover the hidden and out-of-date information that is commonly used in traditional reporting.
Common to qualitative analysis that form the basis of coding processes, we acknowledge the potential limitation of the researcher’s previous experience, knowledge, and mindset leading the results [
7,
66], and tried to overcome it by discussing the findings of each step of the content analysis among the three authors of the paper.
Another methodological limitation involves the analysis focussed on frequencies, which could cause a bias towards simplicity and is short in regard to assessing the different magnitude of the discussed RSAs. To address this limitation, it would be desirable to critically analyse the importance of actions in relation to companies’ core business, main impacts, and performance, as well as compare the efforts and feasibility (in terms of resources) that each action would imply.
It is necessary to underline that, except for the SDGs, the list of entries under the four key elements of the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’ in
Figure 6 is by no means exclusive. Even in the context of the content analysis of the two main fast-fashion retailers, this list may still be too restrictive. Thus, the lists appearing under the categories of CMIs, Topics, Instruments, and Actors aim to serve as a starting point for a dynamic tool co-constructed by the wider pool of fast-fashion ecosystem actors.
Regarding the validity of our scorecard, it would be desirable to expand the testing by replicating it in other sectors and/or through real case studies with primary data. Given the importance of collective impact, reinforced by the complete lack of any reported actions involving only one SC partner or stakeholder, a deep analysis of industry collaboration would truly complement this research.
Finally, given the nature and goals of the ‘Fast-Fashion Sustainability Scorecard’, research on digital and technological solutions supporting the framework’s potential is also needed.