Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is defined as “the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life” (Holme & Watts 2000, p. 10). Among the key issues covered by this concept are human rights, employee rights, community involvement and supplier relations. It also covers an open information policy, including issues as disclosure, transparency, consumer education and anti- corruption measures. Depending on how much emphasis is placed on supplier and consumer relations, the concept of CSR comes close to that of Ethical Trade, which can also extend throughout the value chain. Ethical trade is defined as “the array of different initiatives that seek to add social and environmental as well as financial value added through trade” (Burns & Blowfield 1999) or as a trade in which “the behaviour of the traders is regulated by a value system on which consensus has been reached through an open and rational dialogue involving all parties that are affected by the trade” (Pedersen 1991). When these concepts are extended to the entire value chain, the relationship to Life Cycle Management (Weidema 2001) becomes obvious.
The presentation argues that social responsibility should follow the same system boundaries as life cycle inventory analysis. This extends assessment beyond a single company to suppliers and other stages of a product’s value chain. It links CSR to continuous improvement: quantification should help identify marginal improvements rather than compare average performance alone. Because social conditions vary more between sites than between production technologies, supplier certification may be needed to complement product-level data.
Weidema proposes a common inventory framework with indicators for employee rights (working hours and conditions), Indigenous peoples’ rights (value of materials sourced in violation of claims), income distribution (wages relative to average wages), women’s occupational opportunities, pension schemes, regionalisation and openness of information exchange. The presentation suggests filling data gaps with social extensions to input-output tables and expressing results as social value added or quality-classified working time. Where inventory data do not answer a decision question, LCA-style impact assessment can connect social mechanisms to endpoints and account for geographical differences.
This is a 2002 workshop framework, not a comparative case study with quantified results. Several proposed social conditions are naturally described as yes/no or ordered categories, which do not readily fit an interval scale. The presentation calls for harmonised methods and better site-specific data; generic input-output data are offered as a starting point to improve coverage, not a replacement for supplier-specific evidence.
