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Voluntary sustainability initiatives such as codes of conduct, certification schemes or environmental/social management systems have become the predominant applied approach for companies to specify proactive environmental or social obligations for supply chains. However, companies face two main challenges in the design of voluntary sustainability initiatives for their supply chains: Firstly, they recognize acceptance problems by stakeholders and supply chain partners as well as opposition by competing initiatives. Secondly, companies have realized significant resource demands to set up voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains and ask for more efficient solutions. The article at hand addresses these challenges by identifying the key and complementary resources that enable an effective (i.e., legitimized) as well as efficient design of voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains.

In the following section, conclusions will be drawn from the results of this thesis with reference to the respective research questions. The primary research question (i.e., RQ:Which key resources does an institutional entrepreneur (the focal firm) require to design a voluntary sustainability initiative for supply chains that is legitimised by both participants and external stakeholders?) will be answered implicitly by the sequential answering process of the secondary research questions, rather than explicitly (i.e., the result of RQ is given by answering RQ5).

The preceding chapters developed several elements (i.e., theories and empirics) that must be integrated into a comprehensive research model. Hence, this chapter will recapitulate these theories as well as empirics and develop hypotheses on the relationships between the relevant concepts (see Section 6.1.). While aspects of the design of the voluntary sustainability initiative for supply chains as well as legitimacy effects will be developed based on the initial theoretical framework, hypotheses on key resources and complementarities will be directly adopted from the first empirical study of this thesis. As no effects concerning the nonlinearity of resource value and contingencies could be identified in the exploratory study, these effects will not be considered in the research model. In order to provide a good basis for theory-testing, all hypotheses will be summarised in the form of a table and path diagram (see Section 6.2.).

Having developed a comprehensive research model in Chapter 6, the next step of the thesis involves the testing and confirmation of the derived hypotheses in a large-scale quantitative study. In order to gather quantitative data, the study followed the lead of recent resourcebased investigations of interconnected firms (e.g., Gulati et al., 2005; Kale & Singh, 2007; Mesquita & Brush, 2008; Mesquita & Lazzarini, 2008; Mesquita et al., 2008) as well as of Marcus & Anderson's (2008) work in the field of institutional entrepreneurship and data collection with a survey instrument. Following the call of Boyd et al. (2005), the study used multi-item scales. After the data gathering, the data was analysed via the Structural Equation Method (SEM).

The last chapters outlined the conceptual and theoretical foundations of the research phenomenon at hand. After embedding the design of voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains and the need for legitimacy in a conceptual foundation (Chapter 2), relevant theoretical contributions were elaborated (Chapter 3).

Against the conceptual background given in the previous sections, this chapter will explore a theoretical setting for the design of voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains and legitimacy. This chapter will therefore begin by briefly identifying relevant theories that consider legitimacy aspects in the design and conduct of voluntary sustainability initiatives for supply chains (see Section 3.1.). Secondly, the chapter will explain these theories (institutional theory and institutional entrepreneurship) in more detail and discuss their contributions to the eclectic research framework (see Sections 3.2. and 3.3.). While the institutional theories takes an institutional field-level perspective as the unit of analysis, the resource-based view and its enhancements will be discussed as a complementary theory (see Section 3.4.). This theory addresses the (inter-)organisational means of establishing successful strategies from the strategic-management perspective of a specific firm that acts in network constellations as the initiating company of a voluntary sustainability initiative.

In order to outline the scope of this thesis and set forth the unit of analysis, a conceptual definition must be derived from the literature. Defining the research focus from a conceptual viewpoint is achieved in three sections. In Section 2.1., the concept of proactive sustainability strategies for supply chains is found in the literature. This concept will serve as the research context in which the phenomenon of designing voluntary sustainability initiatives will be examined. This chapter will then present the circumstances in which companies design these strategies in the form of voluntary sustainability initiatives. In this context, it is shown that legitimacy and stakeholders play an important role in designing sustainability strategies (see Section 2.2.), and that the involvement of multiple stakeholders leads to voluntary sustainability initiatives comprising several legitimising elements (see Section 2.3.).