Applying Product Social Impact Assessment (PSIA) to services: the case study of a higher education and research institution

Applying the Product Social Impact Assessment (PSIA) methodology to evaluate the social performance of a service such as that provided by a higher education and research institution is not straightforward. This is mainly due to the lack of materiality of the system, which makes it unfeasible to define a typica life cycle with its conventional stages. This investigation proposes to consider three elements in the social assessment: i) the university, primarily focusing on the wellbeing of its workers and users (students); ii) the material products and infrastructures consumed by the university, focusing on local and global companies; iii) the intrinsic value of the function, focusing on society as a stakeholder. The UF proposed is the completion of 1 academic year, which leads to the accomplishment of a university degree. This preliminary study highlights the difficulty in finding specific and generic indicators proposed in PSIA for the analysis of the social behavior of this system.