Societal Impact : Beyond Frameworks

Abstract

Our research maps the quickly evolving discourse regarding how organizations (corporate, non-profit, and governmental) should define human and environmental impacts and metrics used to assess impact. Our approach is crossdisciplinary, examining empirical work from social scientific scholars and practitioners. Likewise, the sources we reviewed are multinational and multicultural. We identify five categories of societal impact frameworks currently in use: human rights-based frameworks, environment/climate changebased, hybrid frameworks, business-centric frameworks, and frameworks specifically designed to assess the societal impact of research. We nonetheless offer two recommendations. First, we make a meta-ethical claim that two principles are common to the five categories of frameworks. The principles are: 1) support and advance human rights and 2) attend to environmental issues. By articulating underlying principles, we suggest shifting how societal impact may be defined. Rather than define societal impact using a framework, which our research identifies as the most common approach among empirical sources, we suggest that societal impact may be defined in terms of principles underlying multiple frameworks. Second, we recommend praxis, describing a method for designing metrics that may be associated with multiple frameworks.