Social Indicators

Increased interest for sustainability reporting provoked both, companies and academies to deepen their research in sustainability and therefore on sustainability indicators. Special attention is devoted to the social... [ view full abstract ]

Increased interest for sustainability reporting provoked both, companies and academies to deepen their research in sustainability and therefore on sustainability indicators. Special attention is devoted to the social sustainability due to lack of knowledge about this aspect, but also because of increased stakeholder’s pressures and awareness about the possible social impacts along the supply chains. Despite the diversity of the existing methods, the assessment of social sustainability of supply chains still remains a significant issue. Consequently, this research proposes a set of indicators for assessing social sustainability of supply chains. Taking into account the traditional definition of supply chains, where a set of companies operate together in an echelon’s structure, the aim of this research is to enable the assessment of social sustainability within the supply chain, considering the differences that exist within the different echelons. Therefore this work considers dividing the supply chain in three main generic echelon levels – upstream, midstream and downstream. The methodology of this work is built up on the work of Simões et al., 2014, where sixteen social impact categories were identified as the most suitable categories to assess supply chains. The set of quantitative social sustainability indicators are assigned to the sixteen social impact categories accordingly to their echelon level. The validation of the proposed set of quantitative indicators is performed through a content analysis of 142 sustainability reports containing companies of all echelons. The obtained results give clear definition of echelons and social sustainability indicators depending on the echelon level. Additionally, the results help practitioners to support collaborative improvement of sustainability along the supply chain.