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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a
concept applied to business organisations
that choose to behave beyond the legal re-
quirements for their impacts on society and
the environment. A central activity of CSR is
to communicate with society, i.e. through
credible reporting the organisation makes
itself accountable to the public. The scope of
accountability is not limited to single organi-
sations or single aspects. Social and envi-
ronmental aspects in the whole value chain
must be addressed.
The purpose of this research is to develop
and present a framework for managing and
communicating on CSR aspects in the value
chain; appropriately called the framework
for Management and Communication of
Environmental and Social aspects (MCES).
The theoretical background of the research
is systems thinking, CSR and Industrial Ecol-
ogy (IE). The framework integrates product
reporting with a management system based
on the principle of continual improvement.
Economic aspects are not included.
A literature review of management, certifi-
cation and reporting approaches identified
two gaps in current practices. The first is that
there are no globally recognised reporting
approaches that deal with both the proc-
esses and the organisations that together
constitute the value chain. The second is that
there are no reporting approaches that deal
with both social and environmental aspects
in the value chain. The literature review sug-
gests that there is a need for such an inte-
grated approach. This is the first contribu-
tion of the research.
An exploratory case study was conducted in
the Norwegian furniture industry in the pe-
riod between 2005 and 2010. The case study
was divided into four phases. Practical results
include the DATSUPI software and a verified
LCA database, which can be used together
for documenting environmental and social
performance of products and for creating
Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs).
The assessment of social performance in the
case study is limited to chemical use in the
production phase and emissions from prod-
ucts in the use phase. From this comes the
second contribution of the thesis, integrat-
ing product emissions in the use phase into
a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which can in
turn be included in a product declaration.
The method is illustrated in the figure below.
The third contribution of the research
is the MCES framework, which inte-
grates product reporting with a plan-
do-check-act management system. The
framework is based on product reporting as
a central activity in a continual improvement
perspective, where improvement can be
for a product, for a reporting system, for an
organisation or for a value chain. The frame-
work relies on the use of performance indi-
cators with the intention of including both
environmental and social aspects.
The results of the case study indicate that
the main challenge when applying such a
framework is that of finding indicators that
can be allocated and aggregated through-
out the value chain and remain meaning-
ful. This supports the initial findings of the
literature review. Future progress depends
on a scientific consensus on indicators and
aggregation methods, which means that in
the near term transparency in reporting is
critical for CSR.
Contact information:
Christofer Skaar
Senior Advisor, MISA
christofer@misa.no
PhD thesis submitted at Department of In-
dustrial Economics and Technology Manage-
ment, NTNU
Supervisor: Annik Magerholm Fet, annik.fet@
iot.ntnu.no, Department of Industrial Eco-
nomics and Technology Management, NTNU
Figure: Illustration of calculating the toxicity
[CTU] of indoor emissions using USEtox ef-
fect factors (EF)
Managing and communicating CSR in value chains
- By Christofer Skaar
PhD THESIS