Identifying Social Impacts in Product Supply Chains:Overview and Application of the Social Hotspot Database

By C. Benoît-Norris, Deana Aulisio Cavan, Gregory A. Norris. 2012

267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

One emerging tool to measure the social-related impacts in supply chains is Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), a derivative of the well-established environmental LCA technique. LCA has recently started to gain popularity among large corporations and initiatives, such as The Sustainability Consortium or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. Both have made the technique a cornerstone of their applied-research program. The Social Hotspots Database (SHDB) is an overarching, global database that eases the data collection burden in S-LCA studies. Proposed “hotspots” are production activities or unit processes (also defined as country-specific sectors) in the supply chain that may be at risk for social issues to be present. The SHDB enables efficient application of S-LCA by allowing users to prioritize production activities for which site-specific data collection is most desirable. Data for three criteria are used to inform prioritization: (1) labor intensity in worker hours per unit process and (2) risk for, or opportunity to affect, relevant social themes or sub-categories related to Human Rights, Labor Rights and Decent Work, Governance and Access to Community Services (3) gravity of a social issue. The Worker Hours Model was developed using a global input/output economic model and wage rate data. Nearly 200 reputable sources of statistical data have been used to develop 20 Social Theme Tables by country and sector. This paper presents an overview of the SHDB development and features, as well as results from a pilot study conducted on strawberry yogurt. This study, one of seven Social Scoping Assessments mandated by The Sustainability Consortium, identifies the potential social hotspots existing in the supply chain of strawberry yogurt. With this knowledge, companies that manufacture or sell yogurt can refine their data collection efforts in order to put their social responsibility performance in perspective and effectively set up programs and initiatives to improve the social conditions of production along their product supply chain.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ecfcd91e7c69b5ede1384d9b3bd4f774350972f6

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. Richard Wood
2. Huchang Liao
3. Edgar G. Hertwich

In Marketing

1. Enrique Herrera-Viedma
2. Richard Wood
3. Edgar G. Hertwich

In Strategy and Management

1. Richard Wood
2. Edgar G. Hertwich
3. Enrique Herrera-Viedma
4. Ming Tang
5. Zhengjun Wan
6. Huchang Liao
7. Marc A. Rosen
8. T. Wiedmann

Citations in the corpus

• Ten Years of Sustainability (2009 to 2018): A Bibliometric Overview (2018, background): “18 Identifying social impacts in product supply chains: overview and application of the social hotspot database [38] Benoit-Norris, C.”
• The “Bad Labor” Footprint: Quantifying the Social Impacts of Globalization (2014, background): “Examples of these efforts include the Social Hotspots Database [5], the List of Goods Produced with Child Labor or Forced Labor [38], the Global Slavery Index [39], and the Slavery Footprint [40].”
• Social Life-Cycle Assessment: A Review by Bibliometric Analysis (2020, unknown): “Using an additive weighting method based on both worker-hour intensity and risk levels across multiple social themes, the SHDB calculates Social Hotspot Indexes.”