Strategic Prioritization of Integrated Barriers to Industry 4.0 and Circular Supply Chain: Evidence From the Indian Manufacturing Sector

The transition toward Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Circular Supply Chain (CSC) practices presents significant challenges for manufacturing firms seeking to achieve sustainable industrial transformation, particularly in emerging economy contexts. Organizations attempting to integrate digital technologies with CSC models often face complex technological, organizational, and institutional barriers that hinder successful implementation. Addressing this challenge, this study proposes a novel, expert-weighted hybrid decision-making framework that integrates Spherical Fuzzy DEMATEL and Spherical Fuzzy SWARA to identify, analyse, and prioritize the key barriers influencing the integrated adoption of I4.0 and CSC practices. A key methodological contribution of the study lies in incorporating differential expert weighting based on professional experience, which enhances the realism and robustness of decision-making under uncertainty-an aspect largely overlooked in previous studies. The proposed framework is empirically applied to the Indian manufacturing sector, where expert evaluations are used to model the causal relationships and relative importance of the identified barriers. The results reveal that barriers such as lack of global standards and technology transfer, shortage of skilled workforce, and high capital investment with uncertain returns exert the strongest influence on the adoption process. The study contributes methodologically by improving the accuracy of barrier prioritization under uncertainty and theoretically by extending the Resource-Based View (RBV) to explain how resource constraints and capability limitations affect the simultaneous adoption of I4.0 and CSC. From a practical perspective, the proposed framework offers a structured and replicable decision-support tool for managers and policymakers seeking to support digital-circular transformation within the Indian manufacturing context, while also providing insights that may inform similar initiatives in other emerging economies.