Social Sustainability Work in Product Development Organizations: An Empirical Study of Three Sweden-Based Companies

Abstract

Companies responsible for product development (PD) and manufacturing play an important role in supporting society in achieving sustainability, and yet they do not always include full sustainability considerations in PD decisions. The social dimension of sustainability has been largely neglected in the PD field and there is very little empirical evidence of social sustainability implementation in general. The aim of this paper is to investigate how social sustainability is currently included in PD organizations and what their motivations are to do so. Results from a comparative case study approach with three organizations include rich descriptions across four dimensions: The scope of the work and their view of interdependencies with other social systems, their definition of social sustainability and the issues they work with, what guides strategic decisions, and how this internal work is structured. The results reveal that the three product development organizations are heterogenous in their approaches to social sustainability and that the more advanced approach shows a better understanding of the complexity of social sustainability and a broader perspective of its interdependencies, which goes hand-in-hand with a way of organizing that overcomes traditional hierarchies and allows for more collaborative and strategic work in this area. This systems perspective also drives what issues are included in an organization’s work; scope and definition of social sustainability become more encompassing and aligned. Finally, our study shows that social sustainability impacts connected to products’ lifecycles, when addressed, are done so by functions outside design activities, as opposed to product developers. A greater understanding of how companies currently approach social sustainability and what challenges they might face in integrating it in organizational and design related practices has been called for; our paper contributes to this but acknowledges that more work is needed.

Social Sustainability in Business Organizations: A Research Agenda

“…Below we build on our own previous work, and summarize the discussion and status quo in three main fields: general business management, product development, and the supply chain field. Both authors have focused their academic work on social sustainability within organizational contexts for over a decade [5,6,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], having conducted both empirical work and extensive literature reviews. From this, we present in the following section a research agenda that we believe is necessary to move the field of social sustainability in business organizations forward, and it is intended to be an invitation and call to action to fellow researchers in the field, so that academic research could help guide systematic change in business organizations toward social sustainability.…”

“…Companies want to do well by doing good, and stakeholders are seen as partners in "changing the game" to create system-level innovation [41]. In Mesquita and Missimer [24], there is also evidence of this movement. Corporate sustainability emerged as a connected but distinct concept to CSR, emphasizing the embeddedness of firms in socioecological systems and the interdependencies that this generates [38,44,45].…”

“…However, organizational structures and processes for integration continue to be under-researched [49][50][51][52] and are also often not required in practice, e.g., embedding sustainability within a company's structure is currently not required by the GRI or SDG business disclosures [53]. Even fewer studies exist using empirical data to follow up on the implementation of social sustainability or on the organization and integration of social sustainability work in general [24,25]. Wang et al [37], in their editorial to the Academy of Management Review, call for a descriptive research agenda that investigates how and why corporations actually engage in social sustainability (framed as corporate social responsibility) to only then derive a better understanding of how they should engage in social sustainability.…”

A Systemic Approach to the Product Life Cycle for the Product Development Process in Agriculture

“…The LCA also aims to compare the potential environmental impacts associated with products, processes, systems, or supply chains throughout their life cycle [24]. Therefore, it allows for the optimization and integration of processes and cost reduction; In this way, it can manage the data related to a product and all the internal and external factors involved in the development of said product, that is, it is seen as a system that supports the evolution and change in data during the product life cycle [25]. In general, the LCA deals with the behavior of products and/or services, from their launch to their decline, i.e., it concerns the set of production line stages, which may vary from one product to another, given their characteristics, such as sales, marketing, profit, and so on.…”

The Organization of Social Sustainability Work in Swedish Eco-Municipalities

“…Table 1 describes the five levels in the context of strategic sustainable development. [37] with permission).…”