Focus on employee sustainability change agents is growing within corporate sustainability literature yet is fragmented across multiple research streams and disciplines. Increased consistency and clarity are needed for research to support these employees to enact change. In this quest for consistency and clarity, we sought to understand how sustainability change agents are represented within academic literature via a systematic literature review and found a wide variety of terms used to label individual employees who do, could, or should act in support of sustainability, including change agent, champion, changemaker, activist, leader, actor, and intrapreneur. There was almost no consistency in the use of terms relating to whether or not the employee is deliberately making change, the employee's seniority, or (lack of) formal sustainability role. To support both research and practice with improved consistency and clarity of terminology, we propose a typology of terms for employees who make change towards sustainability.

Since the economic crisis in 2008, the world has seen a partly negative shift in social progress, highlighting that current economic models and practices do not guarantee long-lasting societal and human wellbeing. Economic models and business practices are deeply intertwined; thus, businesses play a major role in the advancement of social sustainability, and academic research can offer support in navigating the complexity of this issue. However, social sustainability tends to be under-researched. This article summarizes the discussion in general business management, product development, and supply-chain management, and from this suggest a research agenda to help in guiding systematic change in business organizations towards social sustainability. The article identifies ten main challenges and offers five recommendations to move the field forward, namely, a more explicit engagement with and discussion of social systems-science based ideas, and a more explicit determination as a field to converge on key pieces leading towards a clearer definition of the concept. Lastly, it recommends that research needs to focus on how to overcome fragmented organizational structures, how to achieve true integration into existing processes and tools, and how to support organizations to become more dynamic in working with these issues. © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Though many engineering schools are integrating sustainability in the curriculum, most are still struggling, especially with social sustainability. The aim with this study was to test a process created to help students work systematically with these issues. Results show that students in the study did indeed benefit from structured process support as their general knowledge level of social sustainability issues as well as their understanding of how to integrate them in a product assessment was very low. Reflections from teaching staff on how to further develop such a process are also shared.

The aim of this research was to integrate sustainable development and design-thinking-based product design in order that the product design then contributes to society’s transition to a sustainable future. This is an important pursuit since product lifecycles are a major cause of society’s current sustainability challenges. To address this, many authors argue for integrating sustainable development into existing design processes rather than developing stand-alone tools and methods.Through action research with a design consultancy who wanted to start working with sustainable product design, we iterated between three stages: understanding needs, designing action, and trying out the action. The first stage comprised document analysis, focus-group style workshops, a survey and interviews. When designing the actions (enhancements to their design-thinking-based process), we drew on literature on sustainable product design, decision-making for sustainability, and organisational learning and change for sustainability. We also drew on our research partners’ practical experience. The enhanced process was tried out and further developed through feedback, student testing and co-development meetings.The result is an enhanced process where project teams (i) use the outcomes from the inspiration phase of the existing process to choose sustainable design strategies that are relevant for their particular project. Once the teams have chosen which strategies to work with, for example, design for remanufacture, we suggest that they (ii) use the strategies to develop ideation foci/questions that help them explore the design space. The third enhancement is for teams to (iii) compare concepts with respect to sustainability as part of their concept comparison and evaluation.

Analysing product concepts with respect to social sustainability is a contemporary challenge for which there is little support available for product developers. Our aim was to build on previous work to support product developers in a case company with this challenge. We designed a first prototype of support for product developers to use a previously developed definition when analysing the extraction lifecycle activities associated with their product concepts. The prototype instructs users to model the location of the extraction activities and then use existing databases and indicators to analyse the social sustainability performance of each location. The databases and indicators were selected according to their relevance to scientific principles for social sustainability. We then performed initial evaluation of the support, through which we learnt that the approach may make it possible for product developers to analyse extraction activities, but the level of accuracy of analysis that is possible is not good enough for comparing the concepts in the case study decision. We discuss the implications of these challenges and suggest that it may be better to re-design our approach in order to provide learningful support for product developers or support for other decision-making in the company.

Sustainable design strategies provide tangible ways for integrating sustainability into early phaseproduct design work. Examples include design for remanufacturing and design for the base of thepyramid. There are many such strategies and it is difficult to choose between them. Sustainable productdesign activities also need to be tailored to business priorities. We therefore designed a decision-supportprototype to aid project teams to choose strategies based on relevance to the project in terms of bothbusiness and sustainability value. To design the prototype, we first identified potential strategies fromsustainable product development literature. We then used literature on each of six selected strategies toidentify potential business and sustainability benefits. We developed a way to compare sustainabilityvalue based on a scientifically established definition of sustainability and a lifecycle perspective. Theprototype is designed to be usable by practitioners who are not necessarily sustainable design experts.The prototype was created to enable future work to test ways to integrate the selection of sustainabledesign strategies into the early phases of product design.

Despite the growing awareness of sustainability issues and importance of considering sustainability aspects in the product innovation process, the methodological support for doing so is still immature compared to the methodological support for considering other aspects in the decision-making, such as product performance and manufacturability. The immaturity is particularly pronounced regarding the social dimension of sustainability. In this paper we use a novel process for identifying sustainability criteria and estimating a sustainability compliance index, with the purpose of supporting inclusion of social sustainability aspects in the decision-making in product development. By including social sustainability aspects into a compliance metric, the foundations for strategic and operative decisions can be integrated. The process has been developed and tested collaboratively with industry representatives in a selected case company. Preliminary results show that social sustainability criteria can be integrated in a meaningful way into a more complete metric, and that the learning resulting from gathering knowledge and experience is a first deployable benefit of the process. Challenges and possible ways forward for further implementing social sustainability aspects in product development are also identified and discussed. The next step will be to further test the applicability of the results, by involving more representatives in the case company and from companies in its value chain.

In recent years several approaches to Social LCA have been proposed. Despite recognized shortcomings of those, recent development has focused more on testing existing approaches and less on finding a unifying framework that can support Social LCA to deliver on its promise: to aid decision making regarding social issues related to product life cycles. This paper offers an analysis and evaluation of the potential contribution of the body of work on Social LCA to sustainable development using the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development. A number of strengths and weaknesses from a strategic sustainability perspective are identified and recommendations to improve the support for how to deal with social issues in the product innovation process are provided.

Companies are increasingly pressed to consider sustainability aspects when making decisions during product development. However, the methodological support for doing so is immature. The immaturity is particularly pronounced regarding the social dimension (or pillar) of sustainability and regarding strategic sustainability considerations. The overall aim of this thesis was to explore how the social dimension of sustainability and a strategic sustainability perspective could be better included in methodological support for product development. This was pursued in two ways.

Firstly, a two-staged review of the literature was conducted. Stage one focused on summarizing the state of the art of integration of social sustainability aspects in product development and stage two focused on critically analyzing and evaluating these efforts. The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development was used to guide the analysis of the current integration efforts and the evaluation of their potential for supporting sustainable product development and strategic sustainable development in general. Secondly, a recently published principled definition of social sustainability was used to enhance two approaches for including sustainability considerations in product development. One of these approaches is focused on decision-making support at concept selection, based on assessment and comparison of sustainability implications of the considered product concepts. The other approach is focused on developing sustainability criteria and a related sustainability compliance index in support of concept development.

In the literature review, social life cycle assessment methods (Social LCA) were found to represent a large part of the current efforts, and several challenges with those methods were identified. From a decision support perspective, they were found to have weaknesses regarding applicability and robustness: results from the assessment, usually performed by scientists to evaluate a scientific question, may be too complex to interpret from a business standpoint; the impact perspective may be too narrow, missing important aspects of social sustainability; and generally they lack a strategic perspective. The use of a strategic sustainable development perspective in the approaches prototyped in this thesis is a way of tackling these challenges. The use of backcasting from visions framed by sustainability principles can: help organize and make sense of the general field of sustainability, highlighting where overlaps between objectives exist; provide the long term perspective needed for sustainability; allow for product developers to gain awareness of potential impacts of a product’s life cycle phases within existing knowledge, time and resource constraints; help build a roadmap in order to reduce a product’s contribution to unsustainability (including social unsustainability).

Future research will focus on further testing and development of the suggested approaches and specifically on further development of tactical design guidelines that provide support for the fulfilment of long-term sustainability criteria and clarify the connection between decisions taken during product development and a product’s sustainability profile.

Corporate Sustainability has become mainstream yet the pace of progress and action

towards sustainability targets is deemed insufficient. Research often focuses on

sustainability strategy at the corporate level yet change happens within the black

box of the organisation by the employees. This case study research places focus on

employee action towards sustainability. Asking what are the barriers and enablers

that support such action within a nested holding company system with top

management support for sustainability. Barriers and enablers were found across all

aspects of the systems in question. Though employee buy-in towards sustainability

was found alongside a deep commitment by the owner as the driver of the corporate

culture of action towards sustainability. The pervasive difficulty of transforming an

organisation within a value chain was the biggest perceived barrier alongside a need

for deeper sustainability understanding and skills to navigate complexity and deal

with trade-off decisions and unforeseen outcomes. Finally, our findings show that

even within a company who actively seeks to empower its employees to act towards

sustainability there is a lack of knowledge and knowhow on how to lead

participatory transformative action within a corporate group.