The development of an activity zone conceptual framework to improve social value implementation in construction projects using human activity systems

The delivery of social value outcomes has been surrounded with confusion for publicly procured construction projects recently. A conflict between public clients' and main contractors' perspective of social value was found to be due to their opposing motivations. Public clients' perceptions of social value are grounded in visions of long term impact due to them being rooted in local contexts for more than the duration of construction. Whereas, contractors, have a short term perspective of social value usually grounded in a transactional view of their association with projects and wider stakeholders.  This view seems to prevail even where clients have moved more towards relational forms of contracting. In addition, the lack of understanding of management methods to measure and deliver social value was seen as a hindrance to the process which is reflected in the selection, implementation and assessment phases of procurement.This paper discusses how the use of Human Activity Systems (HAS) models, as part of Soft System Methodology (SSM), was used to create a conceptual model of social value delivery in construction projects procedure based on different phases of the project from inception to contract management. The benefits of using SSM and HAS in overcoming the problems of social value outcome delivery has been reported elsewhere, by the authors. The researchers used focus groups/expert panels to gather information from experts about social value delivery in the UK local construction context to gain their perspectives about the phenomenon and to build the HAS models. The empirical data is presented here.