Social Value in Construction

Beyond Policies and Social Washing: How Social Procurement Unfolds in Practice

“…These newer legislative acts and policies have spurred both public and private organizations to engage in social procurement [3,7,24,25], and in fact, social criteria relating to employment of vulnerable groups are today the second most used type of social criteria in public procurement in the construction sector [26]. In North Ireland and Scotland, new work roles which exclusively deal with social procurement are increasingly common, and in many ways, the work with social procurement has become business as usual [17,25].…”

“…This is called social procurement and has, over the last decade, been increasingly used as a way to mitigate societal problems [1]. Social procurement encompasses a wide range of social criteria related to, for example, collective agreements and fair working conditions, health and safety, procuring from local, women's, or minority-owned enterprises, and employment creation for disadvantaged groups [2][3][4][5][6][7].…”

“…Furthermore, although the empirical setting for this paper is the Swedish construction sector, employment requirements are novel and practices are still diffuse in many different sectors and geographical contexts, so the issue with diffuse practices and lack of knowledge is an international problem (cf. [1,5,7,16,18,20]). Therefore, to fill this empirical and theoretical knowledge gap, this paper aims to analyse the effects on operative level practices when employment requirements are implemented.…”

Social Value: Co-creation, Challenges, and Assessment

“…Social value impact assessment and measurement is a process that accounts for various types of value created by businesses, projects, and programs that extend beyond the economic to include social, environmental, cultural, and health impacts affecting individuals and communities (Raiden et al 2019). The term "assessment" is an important companion to "measurement"this way we recognize that there is a limit to the factors that can be quantified and monetized.…”

“…Detailed recording of what was measured, in what way, and the accompanying assumptions will help improve practice going forward. Similarly, there is room to improve in guarding against individuals and businesses intentionally gaming the assessment framework or only focusing on the positive outcomes (Raiden et al 2019). Perhaps the most common confusion, conceptually and semantically, is around outcomes and outputs, which are often used interchangeably.…”