Remodelación de la embarcación.

In the above example it was shown how the endpoint categories of human well-being may vary in significance depending on context. In this small analysis it will be suggested that also the issue of how to obtain valid data about the issues affecting the endpoints may depend on context.

As indicated in section 2.1 several scholars within SLCA suggest the need for site specific data collection. Site specific data on social impacts can be collected through audits, often called ‘social audits’, which may be described as an attempt to identify, measure, evaluate, report and monitor the effects a corporation is having on a society that are not covered in the traditional financial reports (Natale & Ford 1994).

How a social audit is performed is very important for the accuracy of the audit (Pruett 2005). For example, simply assuming that management in a company is telling the truth about the workers right to organise or even that the workers do when interviewed in the work place may in many cases be misleading. Thus, claiming that when data is gathered through audits, accurate data is obtained

13 _{Schalock et al. (2005) do not use the term endpoint categories, but rather ’core domains’. However, here we will keep} to the LCA terminology and use the endpoint category term.

14 _{It should be noted that these studies are made in the field of disability research, implying that they address contextual} variation of endpoint categories in relation to disabled persons. Cummins (2005) supports, however, that these

may be too optimistic (Pruett 2005, ETI Forum 2006, O’Rourke 2000). The procedure how this is done is therefore crucial. In relation to this example, what is important to identify is whether auditors perform audits differently depending on the context in order for the audit to represent the actual situation as accurately as possible, i.e. to get a valid assessment. However, as no such studies exist in the present literature on social auditing, the author of this thesis made a very limited

empirical investigation on the issue, which was planned to be a first investigation in a series which should address the question. The project did, however, never get that far.

The chosen method was to perform relatively structured interviews with social auditors. The more structured approach was chosen because we had a rather clear idea about the purpose of the

interview. However, an obstacle was that auditors obviously do not perform audits to do an SLCA. Another form of audit which is performed, on the other hand, is to check whether suppliers operate according to a company’s Code of Conduct (CoC). In some ways the SLCA indicators and a CoC can be compared, as they both state aspects which should be followed in the operation of e.g. the audited supplier. Yet, whereas the goal of a CoC is to check compliance, the SLCA is often

considered to be more ambitious; not only should it check whether or not certain types of impact are occurring, it should also check the magnitude to which these are occurring in order to get a more nuanced score than just a yes or no to compliance. This would obviously create a small change in the auditing procedure, but it was still found safe to ‘extrapolate’ the experiences from the ‘CoC audits’ to the potential ‘SLCA audits’.

The interviews started by investigating whether the auditor had the necessary experience in terms of issues that the auditor had audited against, in order to address whether the auditor had audited against the same aspects normally included in SLCA approaches (see Jørgensen et al. 2008). In addition the length of experience, the types of companies in which the auditor had performed audits, and the geographic locations were investigated. Also it was necessary to address whether the

auditor had as a primary goal for the audit to illustrate the actual situation as accurately as possible, since if the goal was e.g. to ‘please the supplier’ which is actually heard of, the auditors potential contextual variation of the auditing procedure would not necessarily be performed in order to increase the validity of the audit.

As the auditor answered ‘satisfactory’ to these questions, the auditor was then asked whether, and if so, how and why the auditor changed procedures according to context.

The interview showed that the auditor in several ways varied his approach depending on the

context. For example some companies in some countries did not have contracts, which according to the auditor did not mean that the employees were hired without contract, but simply that the

‘standard’ contract was avoided to circumvent the taxation rules. Instead of contracts the employees had ‘small red books’ where the contractual relationships between employer and employee were settled and therefore accepted by the auditor as a contractual relationship. The example thus shows that the issue of how contracts should be audited for depends on the context.

Another example related to the fact that not all companies had the same designations of occupation, implying that according to the auditor different occupational positions should be audited according to different issues in different contexts, and that procedures for whom to audit could therefore not be standardised.

A third example mentioned related to attempts by companies to cheat the auditor. The auditor for example mentioned that in some countries people were hired to look for westerners at the train stations to warn the companies before an auditor came. In other countries ‘double bookkeeping’ was a more favoured trick. The auditor thus had to pay special attention to certain issues in certain contexts to avoid these and other tricks.

As mentioned above, this is a very small investigation and does by no means give a full picture of the influence of context on how audits are being performed. Other experiences would probably be

25 reported by other auditors if interviewed, as was the original intent. However, the analysis does point to the possibility that performing a valid audit can be seen as workmanship and that the context will probably be significant for how the audit is performed.