Navigating the digital shift: Stakeholders’ power and social sustainability in Agri-food supply chains

Social sustainability remains a critical yet underexplored challenge in agri-food supply chains. Although supply chain digitalization (SCD) is widely acknowledged to enhance transparency, coordination and accountability, existing research has paid limited attention to its social sustainability implications and the mechanisms through which such outcomes are realized. In particular, how stakeholder power dynamics condition the translation of digitalization into social sustainability remains insufficiently theorized. Drawing on resource dependence theory and the power dependence perspective, this study developed and tested a moderated mediation model that explains how SCD is associated with social sustainability through performance-mediated mechanisms under heterogeneous governance conditions. Using survey data from 328 agri-food firms in China’s national digital transformation pilot cities, we examined financial and market performances as distinct mediating pathways while differentiating stakeholder power into non-, reward- and coercive-mediated forms. Our results indicate that SCD contributes to social sustainability primarily through market performance, while financial performance plays a partial mediating role. Moreover, stakeholder power exerts asymmetric moderating effects across these pathways. This study advances theory by conceptualizing social sustainability as a contingent outcome of digitalization-enabled resource dependence and by positioning stakeholder power as a governance condition shaping socially sustainable planning and control outcomes in agri-food supply chains.