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.
Highlights
The aim of this paper is to do exactly this, to provide empirical evidence of how social sustainability is currently included in product development organizations (PDOs) and what their motivations are to do so
In organization A, for example, we started with interviews at the operational level of product development activities to quickly realize that social sustainability concerns were foreign concepts to the interviewees and that we needed to search for insights elsewhere
In-depth interviews with 21 professionals of three different large PDOs provided several insights into current organizational practices related to social sustainability and into barriers and opportunities for PDOs to better contribute to social sustainability
Summary
Worldwide production and consumption of products are a key cause of ecological and social problems that we face today [1,2]. Companies began to consider measuring the ecological aspects of products over their entire lifecycles and to attempt to use this knowledge to improve the products. This shift gave rise to a new wave of studies focusing on integrating sustainability considerations in the PD process. As part of these efforts, several concepts, methods and tools were developed, such as eco-design [7], design for environment (DfE) [8], and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) [9]. Amounting to over 600 unique tools and methods, these have in recent studies [10,11] still been deemed insufficient when it comes to facilitating sustainability integration in existing company processes and a resulting adoption by industry as a whole
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