European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

www.elsevier.com/locate/dsw

Social impact assessment

Henk A. Becker

Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.140, 3508 TC Utrecht, Netherlands

Abstract
In this article social impact assessment is described and discussed. Social impact assessment is dened as ``the process
of identifying the future consequences of a current or proposed action which are related to individuals, organizations
and social macro-systems''. The main characteristics of this method are summarized. Methodology for this type of
policy oriented social research is presented. Also the main types of social impact assessment projects are dealt with.
Following this the most important problems encountered in this type of research are discussed and experiences are
reported. Finally the perspectives of social impact assessment are explored. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.
Keywords: Analysis of consequences; Ex ante evaluation; Forecasting; Impact assessment; Simulation; Social impact
assessment; Strategic learning; Strategic planning

1. Introduction
In the mid-1960s I got involved in a computer
simulation of the careers of managers in the
Netherlands. I used a national sample of top and
middle managers and I simulated inter alia the
consequences of hiring more young managers with
a high level of education on long-term developments in the managerial population in this country
(Becker, 1969a,b,c). Nowadays I would call this a
simulation with a cohort replacement model. The
research project triggered a number of developments in my work as a sociologist. In the rst place

*
Tel.: +31-30-2532101; fax: +31-30-2534405; www.fss.uu.nl/
soc/hb.
E-mail address: h.a.becker@fss.uu.nl (H.A. Becker).

I got interested in the methodology of simulating

complex social systems in the area of discipline
oriented research (Becker, 1972a,b, 1974). Secondly I got involved in the elaboration of the
methodology of ex ante evaluation of the consequences of interventions in complex social systems
(Becker, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1987a,b,c, 1988, 1995,
1997; Becker et al., 1989). Last but not least I
embarked upon a long series of ex ante evaluations
(Becker et al., 1985, 1986a,b; Becker, 1990a,b;
Becker and van den Bos, 1984). Gradually I
started to call my simulations ``social impact assessments'', primarily because I got involved in the
International Association for Impact Assessment
(IAIA). I might have called them operations research on complex social systems as well. Social
impact assessment has been applied since the late
18th century.

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H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

Since the mid-1960s this eld of policy oriented

social research has changed substantially. The
major developments are:
1. We now have not only computer simulation but
also mancomputer simulation and man simulation. The latter is also called gaming. Man
computer simulation and gaming can be used
for analytical but also for training purposes
(Becker, 1976).
2. The methodology of ex ante evaluation, originally restricted to evaluation in a strict sense,
has been elaborated, now spanning the whole
project of social impact assessment (Becker
et al., 1981; Becker, 1997).
3. Now we have not only social impact assessment
but also environmental impact assessment,
technology assessment, economic and scal impact assessment as well. In most cases nowadays in a project of environmental impact
assessment a sub-project providing social impact assessment is incorporated. Technology
assessment, economic and scal impact assessment are combined with a social impact assessment sub-project too as a rule.
4. Social impact assessment has gradually unfolded into a type of policy oriented social research,
that is applied in all sectors of society.
5. Social impact assessment has evolved into a
eld of social research incorporating (a) ex post
evaluation of old social impact assessment projects in order to improve social impact assessment methodology, (b) theory formation, (c) a
code of ethics, (d) professional organizations
and international conferences (Becker and Leeuw, 1994; Becker, 1997).
6. In many Western countries social impact
assessment is obligatory now in the preparation of government actions (Becker, 1997).
Many business corporations and no-prot organizations have adopted social impact assessment as a standard requirement in policy
formation.
7. The number of practitioners of social impact
assessment is growing steadily all over the
world. Introductory and advanced training in
social impact assessment are oered by many
universities and in training seminars held in
conjunction of annual conferences held by the

IAIA. A masterclass providing advanced training, rst held in 1998 and to be repeated annually, uses Internet and video-conferencing in
order to reach participants from all over the
world.
Most people usually imagine large development
projects like dams and reservoirs when they hear
the words social impact assessment. These schemes,
often commissioned by national governments,
mostly have dramatic consequences for villagers,
their homes and their elds. There are indeed
many social impact assessments, which explore the
social consequences of these types of development
projects. Another kind is legal impact assessment.
For example, European integration will have
consequences for social security policies in the
member states. The member states have to prepare
for deregulation and for new legal provisions and
in this connection social impact assessors are actively assessing the consequences of deregulation
and re-regulation (see de Kemp and Sips, 1994).
We also nd social impact assessment in commercial enterprises. Management teams apply
strategic learning to explore shifts in the social
environment of their organizations, to design new
strategies, and to simulate the consequences of
these shifts for the activities of their organization,
their customers and their competitors (see
Schwarz, 1972; Senge, 1990).
What is implied by the term impact assessment
in a general sense? Impact assessment can be dened as the process of identifying the future consequences of a current or proposed action. One of the
major sub-elds of impact assessment is social
impact assessment. I dene social impact assessment as the process of identifying the future consequences of a current or proposed actions, which
are related to individuals, organizations and social
macro-systems.
In this article I want to summarize the methodology available for projects of social impact
assessment (Section 2). Next I want to describe the
main types of social impact assessment projects
(Section 3). Following this the major problems in
this kind of research are discussed (Section 4).
Also some experiences are reported (Section 5).
Finally the perspectives for social impact assessment are explored (Section 6).

H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

2. Methodology for social impact assessment

As orientation, I will begin by sketching a
prole of social impact assessment. Fig. 1 gives a
ow-chart of the initial and main phases of a largescale project. Because social impact assessment
deals with the consequences of a current or future
action, we rst have to take a closer look at the
action itself. An action is launched to mitigate or
eliminate a problem. A problem is the discrepancy
between a desired situation or process and an actual situation or process. Who decides whether a
discrepancy requires action to mitigate or eliminate it? This question leads to specications being
made by the central decision maker in the problem. Next we have to discover what the nature of
the problem is, and why it has been judged serious
enough to merit action. Perhaps the problem is
located in substantial shortcomings in the host
social system. We have, however, to guard against
false problems. Taking action sometimes only
makes the problem worse and in such a situation
action is a waste of time and money.
Carrying out a rigorous problem analysis at the
beginning of an assessment project is an extremely
complex procedure and is perhaps the most dicult activity in the whole project. Assessors often
discover that they only see the problem clearly at
the end of a project. Even discovering the identity
of the central actor may prove dicult because

313

more than one actor is often involved. We are

accustomed to referring to a central actor who
launches an action directed at a target system.
However, in many social systems the target system
reciprocates by launching action itself. The problem analysis report has to meet very high standards.
Problems that may require input from a social
impact assessor in most cases are situated at the
meso- or macro-level. At the meso-level, we may
encounter processes or situations in organizations
or social networks that are unsatisfactory to one
or more actors involved. These actors dene the
problem as a focal issue for intervention (Blake
and Mouton, 1976). At the macro-level, a social
problem can be dened as an alleged situation that
is incompatible with the values of a signicant
number of people who agree that action is needed to
alter the situation (Rubington and Weinberg,
1981). An alleged situation is a situation that is
said to exist.
People talk about it. The allegation, however,
need not actually be true. People may be afraid of
risks that are in fact minimal. Incompatibility with
values is also a complex matter. Dierent people
hold dierent values, and the same person may
hold conicting values. For these reasons, dierent
people consider dierent things to be social problems. How many people are a signicant number?
In studying social problems on a macro-level, we

Fig. 1. Flow-chart of a large-scale social impact assessment.

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H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

usually deal only with socially troublesome or

deleterious situations that are recognized as
problems by the public. Sometimes, the social
impact assessor will feel obliged to take the role of
the social critic, maybe as a single person opposing
social injustice. In that case, the number of individuals being concerned is (still) extremely small.
A communication strategy must be designed at
the very beginning of the assessment project. Some
assessors are convinced that every impact assessment project requires full public participation in
the decision making process. This may make sense
if we are dealing with regional development or the
process of reorientation in an organization. Full
participation of all parties, however, would be
absurd in situations where actions were being
considered to control illegal activity or where secrecy was required because an organization had
not yet fully committed itself. For example, it
would not be appropriate to involve criminal organizations in an impact assessment. A political
party probably would not have full public participation if it were to commission a social impact
assessment to consider the impacts a range of
positions it might take on certain issues so that it
could have information before adopting a nal
policy position. This would be especially true if the
issue was particularly controversial. However,
general communication with everyone involved in
the action is wise, and should be followed to the
end of the assessment project.
We now have to analyze the social system we
are dealing with. Having already mentioned the
central actor and the target actor, we must go on
to identify the other actors involved. We have to
dene the boundaries of the system, its sub-systems and related phenomena outside the system's
boundaries. System analysis provides us with a
conceptual model of the system. The hard core of a
conceptual model of a social system is a survey of
actors, their behavior, their objectives and their
action space. The action space is the amount of
room left for maneuvre after the constraints faced
by the actors have been taken into consideration.
In most cases, the problem to be mitigated or
eliminated and the social system hosting the
problem will have a history. A critical account of
this history is called the base-line analysis. The

impact assessor goes back in time sometimes

years, sometimes decades and reconstructs what
has happened as far as the problem is concerned.
In order to come as close as possible to a causal
analysis, description has to be combined with explanation and interpretation. Insight into the developments that caused the problem is a necessary
precondition for designing adequate mitigating
strategies.
After analyzing the past, we have to explore the
future. In the preliminary phase of a social impact
assessment project, future analysis is restricted to a
critical inventory of trends. We focus on the extrapolation of developments we can forecast in a
relatively precise and reliable way. Here we can
take the example of the cohort replacement of individuals born in a particular year. If we are discussing a country that has been free of war and
natural disasters, mortality can be predicted in an
accurate way. The greying of North America and
Europe, for example, can be explored by trend
analysis (Becker, 1995).
Exploring the future also requires designing
and institutionalizing a monitoring system that
will provide information about the development of
action and its intended and unintended consequences. Monitoring intervention is important
because, more often than not, decisions for interventions are implemented in ways that dier from
the formulation of the decision that initiated them.
It is no coincidence that the body of scientic literature on implementing policy decisions has
grown substantially in recent years.
Towards the end of the initial phase, we have to
make a critical review of how far we have come in
our explorations. Are the decision makers and
impact assessors prepared to launch the main
phase of the project? If they are, then research
questions and the overall design of the project has
to be elaborated with great care.
In the main phase of the project, the rst step is
scenario design. Scenarios are sketches of possible
future contexts for the actor system and the target
system. In most cases, three to ve scenarios provide an adequate basis for simulating what might
happen to the systems we are interested in. If we
want to introduce more noise into the systems, we
add one or more critical incidents. Designing

H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

scenarios is both a scientic and an artistic enterprise, and in designing them we require a theoretical model of the processes to be simulated. For
this reason, designing scenarios and in a broader
perspective impact assessment projects, is a kind of
art-science.
The following step is to design strategies that
might mitigate or eliminate the problem. Strategies
are plans for the action the central actor has in
mind. Designing strategies also belongs to the area
of art-science. In most cases, 35 strategies are all
we need to prepare the intervention. In preparing
complex interventions, it is advisable to specify
strategies, tactics, and operational plans.
Assessing impacts involves a number of simulations. Here strategies are tested by confronting
them with the various scenarios and, if necessary,
with each of the critical incidents as well. The
simulations can be based on the data from previous projects and ex post evaluations. The outcomes of these simulations are insights into the
strong and weak aspects of each of the strategies,
specied for each scenario. We have to keep in
mind that impact assessment, including social impact assessment, is a kind of simulation. We pretest actions in an articial setting in order to gather
information about possible consequences.
One of the outcomes of the simulation must be
a ranking of strategies. A strategy that shows
many favorable outcomes under one scenario may
be a disaster in another. Strategies are ranked per
scenario and per critical incident, from a least regret strategy to a most regret strategy, and there
are a number of techniques for ranking scenarios.
If it is possible to quantify costs and benets in
monetary terms, costbenet analysis will be preferred. If, however, negative and positive aspects
cannot be expressed in monetary terms, it is better
to apply multi-criteria analysis.
After the rst round of simulations, we will
probably have found many weaknesses in the
current or proposed action and we will hesitate to
launch the action because we are discontented with
its negative consequences. This hesitation leads to
a redesigning of the action in order to mitigate its
negative impacts. After the strategies have been
redesigned, we again simulate their fate and rank
them once more. Iteration sometimes requires 10

315

or more rounds of redesigning, simulation and

ranking.
Finally the products of the social impact assessment project are ready for reporting. In most
cases, multiple reporting is necessary in order to
reach all appropriate audiences. Reporting ranges
from executive summaries and press releases to
full-scale reports and workshops. In social impact
assessment, written reports are gradually becoming less important than oral and audio-visual
presentations. In the course of strategic learning,
policy makers may be confronted with the outcomes of the assessments of scenario-to-strategy
workshops. The latter approach implies that communication has taken place between decision
makers and impact assessors at regular intervals
during the project.
The hallmark of good advice is its impact. The
same applies to the results of a social impact assessment project. During the project, the assessor
stimulates participation by decision makers and
other relevant social actors. The stimulation of
implementation continues after the assessment
project. Often members of sta units in the action
system will be made responsible for a longer-term
stimulation of the implementation where, for example, the monitoring process is continued and
strategic learning is institutionalized.
Finally, the auditing of a social impact assessment project will provide information on its performance, its cost-eectiveness and the t between
plan and actual process. If government nancing is
involved, auditing will be prescribed formally and
the National Audits Court will comment on the
project. Closely related to auditing is ex post
evaluation. The beneciary of the evaluation report will be the scientic community or, in our
case, the impact assessment community. Maybe
the project yields new insights into social assessment methodology or the organization of projects
in this kind of policy oriented research.
The term policy oriented research emphasizes
that we are dealing with a certain type of research.
In most cases, however, a social impact assessment
project is more than research. This is particularly
apparent when the research project is integrated
into a process of strategic learning (Wolf, 1981;
Finsterbusch and Wolf, 1981; Finsterbusch et al.,

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H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

1983, 1990; Interorganizational Committee on

Guidelines and Principles, 1993; Taylor et al.,
1995).

3. Types of social impact assessment projects

Impact assessment does not yet have a fully
elaborated, generally accepted typology. In most
cases, impact assessors use a rather simple typology: environmental impact assessment, technology
assessment, economic impact assessment, and social impact assessment. This typology provides a
global overview and each impact assessment project can be categorized using this typology. Projects are classied according to the rst-order
impact they evaluate. There is one exception to
this rule. Technology assessment is classied according to the action to be pre-tested and not the
target system at which the action is directed.
Three types of social impact assessment can be
identied: micro, meso and macro. The types are
constructed on the basis of their predominant
features. Type 1, micro-social impact assessment,
focuses on individuals and their behavior. Type 2,
meso-social impact assessment, focuses on organizations and social networks (including communities), while Type 3, macro-social impact
assessment, focuses on national and international
social systems. The three types can be found in
dierent settings, sometimes exclusively focused on
social impacts, while at other times, they can be
integrated with other forms of impact assessment.
They can be project based, or they can be applied
to policies when it is also called strategic impact
assessment. In Fig. 2 the typology is summarized.
We will begin by considering micro-level projects. In many social impact assessment studies, the
target system is generally represented by a number
of individuals, their goals and their behavioral
choices. Analyzing the consequences of a current
or proposed action often requires studying the
activities of these individual actors. An example
from demographic impact assessment might be the
policy maker in higher education who is interested
in the consequences for enrolment of any change
in the scholarship system (Becker, 1995).

This kind of social impact assessment frequently takes the form of a micro-simulation. In a
micro-simulation, we focus on micro-units in the
target system. In the example cited here, these are
individual educational careers. The system studied
is simulated by a model, which allows the characteristics of individual educational careers to be
adjusted from time to time. In other words, a micro-simulation acts on micro-data, which represents several thousand individual actors, their
goals and their behavioral choices. The use of data
from the micro-level has given this simulation
model its name.
The essence of micro-simulation lies in a program which focuses on a multi-actor, multi-level
and multi-process analysis. A micro-level presentation of individuals and their social, economic
and demographic characteristics, together with
other relevant spatial and activity attributes, provides the basis for the simulation (Nelissen, 1993,
p. 34). Information about individuals is stored in
the form of personperiod les which are updated
for each period.
Second, the meso-level: here action is directed
at an organization (which is neither too large or
too small) or a social network. How does a social
impact assessor work? Here I take my example
from a gender impact assessment study (Verloo
and Roggeband, 1996). Will a specic retrenchment policy in the university sector result in decreased career opportunities for female academics?
Cuts in a university budget will aect the academics employed in various ways.
Older professors who have reached the upper
levels of the salary scale for this type of employment will not experience any problem nancially.
However, other academics, many of whom are
female, who are ready to move from their position
at the lower end of the salary scale to an intermediate level in the academic hierarchy may be
forced to stay longer in their present position if
those senior positions cease to exist.
Third, the macro-level. Again an example can
best demonstrate this type of social impact assessment. As I have already mentioned, the European Union requires the free circulation of
workers and as a result it will be necessary to
harmonize social security schemes. A macro-sim-

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317

Fig. 2. Typology of social impact assessment projects.

ulation of a number of social security arrangements could be used to analyze the impacts of innovations and impact assessors, for example. The
focus will then be on the impact each innovation
might be expected to have on wage level, the percentage of unemployed in the labor force and
schemes for nancing social security provisions.
Macro-level social impact assessments often consist of pre-testing a country's legal arrangements.
In most cases, this typology provides an adequate basis for classifying social impact assessment
studies. Now and again, a study will have the
characteristics of more than one type, and in such
cases the study must be classied according to its
dominant characteristics.
4. Major problems in social impact assessment
The discussion of major problems in social
impact assessment starts with the determination of
the size of the study. An instant social impact assessment study requires, roughly speaking, 15
minutes up to 1 month. It demands up to 1 personyear of eort. There is enough experience with
instant social impact assessments to make them an
interesting option. Organizations confronted frequently with situations that require instant social
impact assessment will see to it that they have
experienced sta at their disposal. They will also
see to it that they have a problem analysis, a
baseline analysis and a set of scenarios prepared in
advance. A medium-sized social impact assessment
study will require 13 person-years and it will take
13 person-years to complete the project. In the

case of large-sized social impact assessment studies

we are talking about projects with more than 3
person-years sta, that take more than 3 years to
complete. Strategic learning, combining research
with action, requires a medium-sized or a largesized project.
Coping with risk and uncertainty in the social
impact assessment study requires risk assessment.
Both subjective and objective risk demand the attention of the social impact assessor. Mitigating
risk demands risk management.
The central actor has to design and implement a
policy for the organizational setting of social impact assessment. If the organizations needs social
impact assessment over a long period of time, institutionalization has to be taken care of. An option available to the central actor is to entrust
social impact assessment to one or more members
of sta in a specic unit established for social impact assessment. Another option is employing
consultants on a temporary basis. Many organizations, in particular large ones, prefer to combine
an internal and an external input of expertise.
If public involvement is required, either consultation or participation will have to be established. A number of threats are involved. Change
agents may discern too late that trouble arises. The
public may be overloaded with invitations to cooperate in consultation or to participate in decision making.
For its progress social impact assessment is
heavily dependent on oriented basic research. The
social impact assessment community has to monitor developments in this kind of research. As soon
as progress has been achieved in data acquisition,

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H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

statistical analysis, and theory formation, the new

knowledge has to be transferred to the practitioners in the eld.
Social impact assessment has also to be discussed as a moral obligation. Consequentialism
advocates the assessment of the consequences of
interventions. It also advocates to take responsibility for the consequences of the interventions.
The normative debate leads, inter alia, to the design and institutionalization of a code of ethics
(Dewulf, 1991; DeTombe, 1994; DeTombe and
van Dijkum, 1996).
5. Experiences
In the early 1980s in Europe and North
America developments in social impact assessment
changed both in speed and in content. The economic recession forced government agencies and
business rms to become aware of their political,
economic and social environment. They employed
social scientists to assist in training programs, e.g.
in strategic learning. They invited social scientists
to analyze problems, pre-test actions, explore future developments and assist in reorganizations.
Many social scientists started private research and
consultancy rms.
The social sciences in those years show a
growing emphasis on step-by-step attempts to
improve methods and theories. Improvements can
be discerned in problem analysis. Systems analysis
has elaborated languages to deal with complexity,
to facilitate computer simulations, and to bridge
the gap with articial intelligence. Explanation
and interpretation in social sciences research have
gradually been improved from the early 1980s
onwards. In the late 1990s, the social sciences can
now provide an integrated system of explanation
and interpretation using meta-theories, theories
and research hypotheses.
Micro-analyses in social impact assessment
have prospered, in particular in demographic impact assessment, primarily because population
problems have become more and more pressing.
Demographic data on individual life courses were
available on a large scale. Analytical models and
explanatory theories were available too. Meso-

analyses and macro-level social impact assessment

followed a similar trend.
In Europe, social impact assessment has
evolved as a specic kind of policy analysis. A
striking example is health impact assessment. In
the US in the 1980s there also grew social impact
assessment that had no ties with environmental
impact assessment. It depends on the objective and
the research problem of the social impact assessor,
whether an integration of the social impact assessment study in a larger impact study would
make sense. In the US, restriction to a project
often leads to very restricted impact assessments,
leaving out social consequences that transgress the
boundaries of the development project. For this
reason, in the US a change from project assessment to policy assessment, also called strategic
assessment, is advocated (Bulmer, 1983; Cernea,
1991; Burdge and Vanclay, 1995; Becker, 1997).
Social analysis in developing countries requires
methods of research used in the developed and in
the developing world. It would be a mistake,
however, to draw too sharp a distinction between
both types of methods. In social analysis in developing countries primarily administrative data,
population censuses and social surveys are applied.
Pitfalls in surveys in developing countries, inter
alia: basic data needed for survey research are
lacking, and concepts and terms used in industrialized countries cannot automatically be transferred for use in survey work in a developing
country. There has been a growing recognition of
the need for merging two or more research methodologies in the same study, in other words the
need for triangulation.
Micro-level social impact assessment is still
scarce in developing countries. On a meso-level we
nd project assessment, more and more replaced
by strategic assessment. On a macro-level, mainly
demographic impact assessment is applied. Settings for social impact assessment in developing
countries have to be improved. It is advocated
inter alia that governments and international organizations should identify and openly analyze the
conicting goals between countries, regions and
groups so as to make fruitful negotiation possible
and to create solutions with mutual gains (Becker,
1997).

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6. Perspectives
I assume that social impact assessment will be
confronted with: (1) an increase in competition
between actor systems, (2) an increase in external
control of actor systems, (3) an increase in the
demand for exibility and innovation in actor
systems, and (4) an increase in the application of
science by actor systems (Becker, 1991).
The acceleration of competition between actor
systems can be interpreted as part of the process of
modernization, in particular of rationalization. In
earlier times, a certain amount of slack was normal
in most organizations, but gradually the drive for
rationalization has lead to an increase of eciency.
We see this happen in business enterprises, because
they introduce internal quality control. We also
observe this in the area of government. In many
countries in the West, government organizations
have adopted internal quality control. Non-prot
organizations follow the same strategy. In many
actor systems, input, throughput and output are
measured and evaluated, followed by eciency
drives. If one organization in a sector of society is
successful in systematically increasing its eciency, other organizations in the sector will have to
try to imitate this success.
The spread of external control of actor systems
is a consequence of changes in the political system
and the mass media. In the political system, opposition parties increasingly use external control of
government organizations as a weapon to attack
the governing parties. The opposition parties try to
establish that the activities of the governing parties
are undemocratic, inecient, or a waste of taxpayers' money. In order to achieve this eect, opposition parties pre-test actions of their opponents
with regard to future consequences, wait for the
actions to be put into practice, evaluate the consequences and round up with the statement I told
you so. The mass media have also adopted this
strategy with regard to acts of government. Unmasking government makes newspaper articles
and television programs successful. The mass media also have discovered the advantages of unmasking business enterprises and non-prot
organizations. They have commercial products
and services tested, followed by publicity about the

319

outcomes. Non-prot organizations are also targeted for ex ante and ex post evaluations. Mass
media have health care tested, by open or unobtrusive observation. They have services rendered
by universities tested, followed by publications
showing the ranking of the education provided
and the outcomes of research published by departments in all kinds of disciplines and institutions. External evaluation forces actor systems to
improve their ways and to watch their reputation.
The demand for exibility and innovation in
actor systems is increasing because these systems
have to survive in a quickly changing environment,
confronting them with, inter alia, increasing cultural diversity of the population, and demands for
emancipation of women and minorities. They have
to change to new instruments and procedures, and
they have to cope with more and more complexity.
These developments put pressure on human resources management. Actor systems have to keep
their sta exible, inter alia by running training
programs and ultimately forcing into retirement
employees who are not able to keep up with
change. These developments also require adjustments of equipment and procedures. Frequently
actor systems must renew their technical infrastructure, in particular with regard to information
systems. When new procedures are introduced in
their sector of society, they are forced in most
cases to adopt these procedures. Competition and
external control pressure them to take the demands for exibility and innovation seriously. The
number of niches that permit actor systems to hide
from external pressure is diminishing. Actor systems have to cope with permanent reorganization.
In all scientic disciplines that can oer their
outcomes for practical use, methods for the application of science are improving and applicable
knowledge is generated as much as possible. This
is because social responsibility is taken seriously,
but also because retrenchments in academic and
related research force scientists to enter the market, to make prot and to nance part of their
basic research out of these prots. At the same
time, actor systems are increasing the application
of science in order to improve their production
systems, organizational systems and social systems. They try to produce goods and services more

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H.A. Becker / European Journal of Operational Research 128 (2001) 311321

eciently by adopting scientic procedures. They

streamline their organization according to scientic insights. They utilize the scientic knowledge
of their sta. We have to keep in mind that actor
systems in most cases remain skeptical with regard
to the benets of applying science. Their attitude
can best be characterized as one of ambivalence.
They are aware of the shortcomings of scientists,
at the same time however continuing to contract
scientists in order to prot from their expertise.
The perspectives of social impact assessment as
a type of research, sometimes of action research,
depend not only on advancements in social impact
assessment but also on the ability of social impact
assessors to bridge the communications gap between outsiders and social impact assessors. The
best way to do this is to present examples of good
research practice and successful implementations.
We can assume, that sooner or later decision
makers will react, because it is in their interest to
identify in each problematic situation a least regret strategy, and to implement this strategy.
However, the perspectives of social impact assessment are not only dependent on self-interest of
decision makers. Its future also rests on moral
arguments, proposed by consequentialism. Decision makers are confronted with a moral obligation to identify the future consequences of current
or proposed actions, and to take knowledge about
these consequences into consideration whenever
they act.
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