How are social procurement actors shaping a new field of professional practice in the Australian construction industry?

Abstract

PurposeSocial procurement is becoming an increasing policy focus for governments around the world as they seek to incentivise new collaborative partnerships with private organisations in industries like construction to meet their social obligations. The limited construction management research in this area shows that the successful implementation of these policies depends on a new generation of social procurement professionals who are promoting these policies into an institutional vacuum with little organisational identity, legitimacy and support. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what these actors do to promote and build support for the implementation of these policies in their organisations.Design/methodology/approachA thematic analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 social procurement actors in the Australian construction industry is presented.FindingsResults portray an experimental, disconnected and nascent institutional field of practice with a high degree of role ambiguity and conflict. In the absence of a clear organisational identity and legitimate power-base, social procurement actors are forced to rely on incremental rather than radical innovation and the power of stories to persuade others to engage with their vision for creating social value through construction.Originality/valueContributing new insights to the emerging “practice theme” in social procurement research, this paper provides important conceptual and practical information about the attributes which determine their success, how they fit into existing organisational structures and how they build support to achieve enabling institutional change. Academically, the results advance understanding of how social procurement professionals are implementing these policies into their organisations. Practically, they provide new information which enable social procurement professionals to improve their practices and construction companies to recruit the right people into these roles and design their organisations to more effectively support them.

A Systematic Literature Review of Research on Social Procurement in the Construction and Infrastructure Sector: Barriers, Enablers, and Strategies

“…There have been calls for the development of training and educational courses for all stakeholders about the need to shift to sustainable procurement practices (e.g., [39,49,72]) and for the development of the skills and competencies needed to implement social procurement [11,29]. This is a clear need.…”

“…Adopt a more person-centric approach to the design and implementation of solutions and a more holistic approach to the measurement of impacts and outcomes. Understand the project context and ensure bespoke solutions rather than use a standardised tool measured against project management metrics and targets-Murphy, and Eadie [51] Support on the change -Appoint more than one social value champion to implement social procurement who each plays a multitude of roles at different organisational levels and across different organisational functions-Loosemore, Keast, and Barraket [39]…”

Reviewing the Trends of Social Value in Construction Research in the Last Decade: A Bibliometric Review

“…The co-authorship network visualization was ignored since there was a link between just two countries under analysis which is Australia and the United Kingdom, unlike other studies that showed the network [4]. Loosemore and co-authors can be seen to be leading research in SV literature in the construction sector [25,26,28,29,[43][44][45][46]. It is also noteworthy that many of these leading authors of SV in the construction industry are affiliated with universities in Australia.…”

Social Value Trends in Construction Research: A Bibliometric Review of the Past Decade

“…The co-authorship network visualization was ignored since there was a link between just two countries under analysis which were Australia and the United Kingdom, unlike other studies that showed a larger network [4]. Loosemore and co-authors can be seen to be leading the research on SV in the construction sector [25,26,28,29,[64][65][66][67]. It is also noteworthy that many of these leading authors on SV in the construction industry are affiliated with universities in Australia.…”