Same Supply Chain, Different Models: Integrating Perspectives from Life Cycle Assessment and Supply Chain Management

150

114

Summary Industrial ecology (IE) 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 an a‐theoretical one. 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 IE.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Industrial ecology (IE) has become increasingly important in business and regulation. IE is the conceptual foundation for the development of approaches to life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) that business organizations and regulators need to systematically integrate to measure the ecological, economic, and social performance of products and organizational behavior (Blass and Corbett 2017). However, unlike established approaches for measuring ecological and economic performance with environmental life cycle assessment (ELCA) and life cycle various decision-making functions, for example, benchmarking performance, tracking progress over time, assessing alternative processes to manufacture a given product (Ness et al 2007;Schwarz et al 2002), monitoring supply-chain performance (Hassini et al 2012), and assessing product-related impacts on the well-being of stakeholders (Jørgensen 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indicators in Social Life Cycle Assessment: A Review of Frameworks, Theories, and Empirical Experience

Kühnen

Hahn

2017

150

114

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) has become essential in industrial ecology (IE) as scholars, regulators, and business organizations increasingly look beyond traditional measurement of financial performance to a more complex integration of performance indicators reflecting the triple bottom line of economic, ecological, and social value (e.g., Blass and Corbett 2018;DeNisi and Smith 2014;Richard et al 2009). However, current approaches primarily report negative burdens from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities" (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000, 5).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From SLCA to Positive Sustainability Performance Measurement: A Two‐Tier Delphi Study

Kühnen

Hahn

2018

Summary Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) currently has a preoccupation with capturing and repairing negative dysfunctions and pathologies instead of fostering positive features that make a human life sustainable and worth living. With the intention to overcome this imbalance, this paper aims at transferring the shift to a positive sustainability performance measurement (PSPM) perspective in industrial ecology. We argue that positive performance is likely to develop from the lens of social life cycle assessment (SLCA), because sustainability is an anthropocentric concept that puts positive benefits to human well‐being (i.e., the social dimension of sustainability) at the center of the analysis. However, the field of SLCA is highly fragmented, without a coherent theoretical understanding and without a clear prioritization of problems and future research directions. Therefore, we engage in an extensive Delphi study with experts from academia and practice to foster a discussion of lessons learned from SLCA for PSPM. In this way, the paper contributes to a more coherent and deeper understanding of both connected fields. The results emphasize that SLCA has become a defensive risk management instrument against reputational damages, whereas PSPM offers the potential to proactively measure and manage positive contributions to sustainable development. We identify three main challenges (definitional, methodological, and managerial) and two main areas of benefits (organizational and societal) and use them to consolidate the debate on SLCA and PSPM and to provide a roadmap for future research.

“…Considering this, it is somewhat surprising that the boundaries of the firm, a central theme in much business strategy literature, does not seem to have been elaborately addressed in the context of industrial ecology. Neither in the vast literature on life cycles and supply chains (e.g., Blass & Corbett, ; Seuring, ), nor in discussions on interorganizational sustainability management (Rosen, Bercovitz, & Beckman, ; Seuring & Gold, ; Sinding, ) have firm boundaries received much attention (Andrews, ; Walls & Paquin, are two exceptions).…”

Section: Industrial Ecology and Organizational Boundariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industrial ecology and the boundaries of the manufacturing firm

Magnusson

Andersson

Ottosson

2019

Summary Decisions on organizational boundaries are critical aspects of manufacturing firms’ business strategies. This article brings together concepts and findings from industrial ecology and business strategy in order to understand how manufacturing firms engage in initiatives to facilitate recycling of process wastes. Based on a distinction between waste recovery and use of the recovered resources, the article introduces a typology of four different strategies: Closed, Outsourcing, Diversification, and Open. Each strategy has a unique set of organizational boundaries and is associated with different motives and benefits for the manufacturing firm. The typology of strategies provides a conceptual contribution to assist industrial managers in strategic decision‐making, and to support further studies on organizational boundaries in industrial ecology research.