A proposal for social and environmental sustainability evaluation using analytical and graphical support

Abstract

This paper presents a procedure to assist companies conducting socioenvironmental sustainability evaluations, an aspect that has become essential for competitiveness. The proposed procedure applies analytical and graphical tools to evaluate companies’ social and environmental dimensions, considering internal and external performance. The development of the proposed procedure comprised five steps: identification of evaluation items, organization of items in dimensions to be analyzed, application of questionnaire, summation, and graphical visualization of results. The questionnaire was applied to 12 companies. A radar graphic was employed for results visualization, where vertical axes represent social and environmental dimensions while horizontal axes represent internal and external dimensions. Surveyed companies revealed higher social and environmental performance in the external dimension, probably due to concern with their market image. It was also observed that exporting companies presented superior social and environmental performance, fact that might be attributed to the more rigorous demand of external market.

Keywords
Sustainability evaluation; Social and environmental sustainability; Social responsibility; Environmental management