Beyond the Literature: a Comparative Analysis of Sustainability Benefits and Risks of Crowd Delivery Businesses in Research and Practice

Abstract

Crowd delivery (CD) business provides an innovative service in managing the tension between delivery speed and cost, while providing work for individuals. While CD is recognized as a promising business in literature, consistently acknowledging its positive impacts on sustainability, real-world practices underscore the prominence of sustainability-related challenges related to managing CD volume, liability, security, trust, and environmental issues. This study aims to bridge this gap between research and practice in CD business sustainability by examining current practices against existing knowledge, investigating sustainability benefits and risks, and identifying discrepancies to understand the business's changing dynamics. In that respect, a multi-method approach is employed, combining systematic literature review (SLR) and semi-structured interviews. Comparative content analysis between research and field data identifies sustainability benefits and risks for CD businesses for environmental, social and economic dimensions and outlines different perspectives of academic studies and field data. This research sheds light on the evolving relationship between theoretical understanding and real-world implementation of the sustainability benefits and risks of CD business under four categories: (1) “research supported by practice”, (2) “research/practice transformed”, (3) “in practice only”, and (4) “in literature only”. These categories underscore the dynamic nature of sustainability in the context of CD businesses, demonstrating areas of convergence and divergence between research and practice and highlighting the need for ongoing development of theoretical frameworks to reflect real-world practices. The implications of this study have the potential to both guide academic research towards practical concerns and enable practitioners to improve CD business sustainability for all stakeholders. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd