A typology of social procurement champions in the construction and engineering industry

Martin Loosemore, Robyn Keast and Jo Barraket

Construction Management and Economics, 2022, vol. 40, issue 5, 391-405

Abstract: Social procurement is re-emerging as an innovative collaborative policy tool for governments around the world to leverage their construction supply chains to help them address intransigent social problems such as long-term unemployment. Such policies challenge deeply rooted institutional norms and structures in the construction industry and research shows that they are being championed by a small and largely undefined group of social procurement professionals who suffer significant role conflict and ambiguity. Contributing new insights to this nascent research, this paper traces etymological definitions of champion roles, merging them with organisational theory to present a new typology of social procurement champions in the construction industry. Drawing on a thematic analysis of snowballed interviews with fifteen recognised champions of social procurement in the Australian construction industry, findings highlight four distinct types of social procurement champion: champions of organisations; champions of the concept; champions of people; and champions of a solution. It is found that there is no one pure type of social procurement champion. Rather, champions have to adapt their social procurement roles to the highly dynamic and varied organisation contexts in which they operate. These findings advance the emerging social procurement debate within and outside construction by highlighting the many different roles which are needed to implement social innovations like social procurement into a project-based industry like construction. It is concluded that organisations which see this as one person’s responsibility are likely to fail in implementing these new policy reforms.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01446193.2022.2043554 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:conmgt:v:40:y:2022:i:5:p:391-405

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RCME20

DOI: 10.1080/01446193.2022.2043554

Access Statistics for this article

Construction Management and Economics is currently edited by Will Hughes

More articles in Construction Management and Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().