Indicators in social life cycle assessment: A review of frameworks, theories, and empirical experience
- Publication Type
- Journal contribution (peer reviewed)
- Authors
- Kühnen, M., & Hahn, R.
- Year of publication
- 2017
- Published in
- Journal of Industrial Ecology
- Pubisher
- Wiley
- DOI
- 10.1111/jiec.12663
Industrial ecology and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) are increasingly important in research, regulation, and corporate practice. However, the assessment of the social pillar is still at a developmental stage, because social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is fragmented and lacks a foundation on empirical experience. A critical reason is the absence of general standardized indicators that clearly reflect and measure businesses’ social impact along product life cycles and supply chains. Therefore, we systematically review trends, coherences, inconsistencies, and gaps in research on SLCA indicators across industry sectors.
Overall, we find that researchers address a broad variety of sectors, but only few sectors receive sufficient empirical attention to draw reasonable conclusions while the field is additionally still largely a-theoretical. Furthermore, researchers overlook important social core issues as they concentrate heavily on worker- and health-related indicators.
Therefore, we synthetize the most important indicators used in research as a step toward standardization (including critical challenges in applying these indicators and recommendations for their future development), highlight important trends and gaps (e.g., the focus on worker- and health-related indicators and the a-theoretical nature of the SLCA literature), and emphasize critical shortcomings in the SLCA field organized along the key phases of design, implementation, and evolution through which performance measurement approaches such as SLCA typically progress in their development and maturation. With this, we contribute to the maturation and establishment of the social pillar of LCSA and industrial ecology.