Social Implications of Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Adoption in Supply Chains

The advance of autonomous vehicles (AVs) shows great potential for improving supply chain (SC) operations and studies have been focussing on the economic and environmental sustainability performance of AV adoption. Social sustainability implications are highly relevant but have, by comparison, received less attention. This study makes several contributions in this context and advances the understanding of supply chain social sustainability (SCSS) in general by investigating social issues in a specific context. Specifically, this study explores the social implications of AV adoption in SCs and develops connections to established constructs in SCSS. By systematically reviewing 58 peer-reviewed papers, this study extracts and synthesises 13 positive and seven negative social impacts. These impacts are then organised within six SCSS indicators, thereby illustrating how key social sustainability categories are affected by AV adoption. Building on these insights, promising research directions that can further advance the understanding of SCSS are identified. This exploration of the social impacts of AV adoption contributes to the conceptualisation of SCSS, while the associated reflection and discussion may affect the social acceptance of AV adoption going forward. Finally, this study offers recommendations for businesses on how to better integrate AVs into daily operations while taking stakeholder societal needs into account and makes suggestions for legislative bodies on how to reflect current rules and develop better legislation for improved usage of AVs in SCs.