THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD OF SLCA. A Critical review in a paradigmatic perspective.

Social Life Cycle Assessment (sLCA) has been conceived to evaluate social impacts in a life cycle perspective, but it is not yet well defined and its process of development is being long and difficult and many different... [ view full abstract ]

Social Life Cycle Assessment (sLCA) has been conceived to evaluate social impacts in a life cycle perspective, but it is not yet well defined and its process of development is being long and difficult and many different approaches and methodologies have been proposed.
sLCA has been conceptualized in an engineering milieu. However, the inherent nature of impacts under assessment are different in sLCA from environmental LCA (eLCA), having roots in different fields of study, disciplines and epistemological bases.
Post-positivism is the dominant paradigm in natural sciences, while sociology is considered a multiparadigmatic science, because many worldviews can be hold. Moving from a reflection about the repercussions of this characteristic of social sciences on sLCA literature, the aim of this research is to shift the current debate on methodologies to an epistemological level through a critical review that attempts to classify sLCA scientific literature, according to two main opposite families of social research paradigms, i.e. post-positivism and interpretivism.
Studies on sLCA have been gathered by means of the most acknowledged online academic databases and scientific literature search engines, using specific parameters of significance.
Each publication has been scrutinized according to the relevance of title, abstract and keywords; then, a speed-reading to search for topical sentences has been conducted. From a first population of works, several references have been discarded to focus exclusively on articles published in indexed and peer-reviewed journals.
A critical text analysis with literal criteria allowed ascribing each of them to the post-positivist or interpretivist family of paradigms. Results showed that about 24% could be ascribed to the first group, while 73% belonged to the group of interpretivism-oriented paradigms. These data deserve some attention, because since the beginnings of sLCA methodologies, most of the scholars claimed for application of the same assessment perspective of eLCA to social impacts. Studies belonging to the group of post-positivism-oriented paradigms mainly referred to impact pathways, cause-effect relationships, and applied mainly quantitative methods supported by mathematical/statistical relationships. Studies ascribed to the interpretivist group, principally, applied qualitative and static indicators and advocated for stakeholders participation, social values, actors or companies’ behaviour, and were more context-bounded compared to first group.
Concluding, this paper attempts to provide a contribution for an advancement of sLCA development, by pointing out that, urgently, a reinforcement of the theoretical bases of sLCA is needed, with more attention to the epistemological discourse.