The product social impact assessment

Since 2013 a group of companies has formed a roundtable with a mission to develop a credible and business viable technique to assess the social impacts of products, brands, and portfolios over the life cycle. Over the past eight years the technique has been tested in case studies by the companies, which has led to further improvements of the Product Social Impact Assessment Handbook, and this chapter describes the fifth iteration of this Handbook released in 2020. In short, the qualitative method uses five-point performance reference scales that focus on performance as well as impact. The performance reference points are based on internationally agreed conventions. The selection of impact categories to be included in the methodology is based on the recognition that companies need a healthy society around them, while they can also have negative impacts on the health of the society. This combination of impacts and dependencies provides the focus to determine the most material social topics of the recognition that companies are dependent. Based on the same analysis we identified four stakeholder categories that seem most relevant for a company: workers, users, local communities, and small-scale entrepreneurs.