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Summary Industrial ecology (IE) and life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) are increasingly important in research, regulation, and corporate practice. However, the assessment of the social pillar is still at a developmental stage, because social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is fragmented and lacks a foundation on empirical experience. A critical reason is the absence of general standardized indicators that clearly reflect and measure businesses’ social impact along product life cycles and supply chains. Therefore, we systematically review trends, coherences, inconsistencies, and gaps in research on SLCA indicators across industry sectors. Overall, we find that researchers address a broad variety of sectors, but only few sectors receive sufficient empirical attention to draw reasonable conclusions while the field is additionally still largely an a‐theoretical one. Furthermore, researchers overlook important social core issues as they concentrate heavily on worker‐ and health‐related indicators. Therefore, we synthetize the most important indicators used in research as a step toward standardization (including critical challenges in applying these indicators and recommendations for their future development), highlight important trends and gaps (e.g., the focus on worker‐ and health‐related indicators and the a‐theoretical nature of the SLCA literature), and emphasize critical shortcomings in the SLCA field organized along the key phases of design, implementation, and evolution through which performance measurement approaches such as SLCA typically progress in their development and maturation. With this, we contribute to the maturation and establishment of the social pillar of LCSA and IE.

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Summary Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) currently has a preoccupation with capturing and repairing negative dysfunctions and pathologies instead of fostering positive features that make a human life sustainable and worth living. With the intention to overcome this imbalance, this paper aims at transferring the shift to a positive sustainability performance measurement (PSPM) perspective in industrial ecology. We argue that positive performance is likely to develop from the lens of social life cycle assessment (SLCA), because sustainability is an anthropocentric concept that puts positive benefits to human well‐being (i.e., the social dimension of sustainability) at the center of the analysis. However, the field of SLCA is highly fragmented, without a coherent theoretical understanding and without a clear prioritization of problems and future research directions. Therefore, we engage in an extensive Delphi study with experts from academia and practice to foster a discussion of lessons learned from SLCA for PSPM. In this way, the paper contributes to a more coherent and deeper understanding of both connected fields. The results emphasize that SLCA has become a defensive risk management instrument against reputational damages, whereas PSPM offers the potential to proactively measure and manage positive contributions to sustainable development. We identify three main challenges (definitional, methodological, and managerial) and two main areas of benefits (organizational and societal) and use them to consolidate the debate on SLCA and PSPM and to provide a roadmap for future research.