Effects of Mass Customization on Sustainability

Sustainability has become increasingly important to business research and practice. Approaches, which support fundamental changes in behavior to act economic, ecological, and social, are required. A popular concept that contributes to these challenges is mass customization (MC). MC—defined as a competitive strategy—allows for producing goods and services for individual needs of customers. In doing so, it, for example, helps toward an increased product-customer relation, efficient production, and a high degree of personalized goods, which may have positive effects on the society and the environment (e.g., by reducing waste). In order to get an overview of which effects of MC toward sustainability are discussed, our study aims to synthesize prior literature. Therefore, we conduct an extensive literature review in different search engines to ensure a broad view on this topic. As a result, 33 articles that met our research purpose are obtained. These articles are coded by three researchers independently and—a total of 157 codes—are consolidated afterward to determine effects of MC on sustainability. Our classification indicates that mostly social (∼87%) and economic issues are addressed (∼84%), while ecological aspects are underrepresented.