Sustainability 2022 , 14 , 2619
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on the suitability for specific tasks. Hence, the results in this study also confirm the context dependency of the selection of allocation methods. How exactly did context factors influence the allocation method preferences of the responding practitioners? The study results are quite mixed. Neither the product character- istics nor the type of considered impact (environmental or cost) seem to provide consistent evidence for an influence on practitioners’ preferences. The results in this respect are surprisingly homogeneous (see Table 3 and Figure S1). Considering the rather distinct discussion and development of cost and environmental impact allocation (see [34]), this result is somewhat unexpected. It could also have been expected that the product character- istics (e.g., large vs. small volume products) would influence the preferences for the criteria physical system or economic. Indeed, the average preference for physical system was higher for lignin (large volume) than for fines (small volume), but the difference was rather small. The criterion calculability and interpretation was also rated as slightly higher with regard to environmental impact allocation as compared to cost allocation (possibly due to the comparably broader interpretability of the term “environmental impact”). All in all, this study did not reveal empirical evidence that practitioners’ preferences for certain allocation methods are substantially governed by variations in considered products or impacts. Although influencing factors regarding product or impacts were not distinctly identi- fied, the clear influence of the respondents’ professional backgrounds can be considered a key finding of this study. In other words, the professional background can be considered as a major factor in contextualizing allocation preferences. Respondents working in the field of production favored the physical system and, hence, preferred taking physical partitioning approaches, while their counterparts from finance and controlling favored the economic criterion (considering both its subcriteria nearly equally), making economic partitioning and system expansion the more preferred approaches. Respondents working in research and development (R&D), meanwhile, assigned ratings in a rather balanced way (but focused much more strongly on the subcriterion ability to bear): their judgments mostly fall between those of the other two professional groups, with the most preferred allocation methods identified as physical partitioning and economic partitioning. Subjec- tivity in allocation choices, as detected in this study, strengthens the view of LCA as an interpretative process [64] in which the reasoning, views and choices behind these need to be understood more fully than is currently often the case. These findings from our study are supported by the strategic management field and its core theoretical premises of decision-making: the role of individual managers is essential in strategic decision-making in firms, and managerial decisions are affected by numerous, human related factors, such as the managers’ skills and capacities or maybe even their daily routines. These results also reflect other results published in the corporate decision-making literature, including in the paper by Schaltenbrand et al. [43], who stated that corporate decision-making is more of an interpretive endeavor than an analytic computation. In the other words, we need a fuller understanding of selective perceptions [65] and various determinants in managerial decision-making [44,66]—all of which have an impact on the choice of allocation methods—for strategic management in biorefinery companies. To our knowledge, these issues have neither been addressed by researchers conducting biorefinery LCAs nor by those looking at allocation choices made in the other fields. Although these findings revealed the relevant effect of the professional background on preferences for allocation methods, the underlying drivers and more specific attributes for this observation have not yet been identified. This would require more research approaches to be taken in the future, including qualitative social research approaches such as the laddering technique [67]. Despite making several requests, we did not manage to involve more participants in the study. This could have been due to their time constraints and unfamiliarity with the topic of impact allocation and/or the type of questioning (i.e., the pairwise comparisons). In addition, the tasks of answering the questions and assigning consistent ratings might have been perceived as burdensome. Therefore, the results cannot be considered as repre-
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