When Collaboration Bridges or Breaks: A Systematic Review of Emerging Trends in Supply Chain Resilience and Sustainability

Abstract

Widespread digital adoption has challenged our understanding of how these tools reshape collaboration, trust and sustainability outcomes across different institutional and network contexts. As networks now pursue resilience and sustainable development in parallel, we map emerging research directions and identify how collaboration and stakeholder engagement are enabled under these dual aims. A systematic literature review augmented by a hybrid deep-learning topic-modeling framework, combining BART for semantic filtering and BERTopic for thematic clustering, maps the evolution of collaboration research in supply chains. The results identify three dominant collaboration architectures: sophisticated optimisation models, smart and distributed platforms and collaborative knowledge ecosystems, each characterised by distinct validation and coordination patterns. From these patterns, we introduce mediator thinness to explain the recurrent gap between digital technical affordances and institutional embedding and propose governance-contingent mechanisms through which emerging digital collaboration influences resilience, sustainability and environmental performance outcomes.