Rhetorical strategies to diffuse social procurement in construction

Social procurement – procurement which aims to create social value e.g. in terms of creating employment opportunities for disadvantaged people – are increasingly implemented in the construction sector. Social procurement is novel in many countries and is often perceived as complex, and recent research has found that actors who work with social procurement spend considerable time and effort in arguing for its usefulness for achieving social objectives. This paper draws upon research from Sweden and Australia, and builds on interviews with actors working in the construction sector. Through an institutional perspective, the paper investigates the institutional logics, and subsequent narratives constructed from these logics, actors use for implementing and legitimizing social procurement. The findings show that actors lean on institutionalized market-based logics when arguing for social procurement, which are constructed into cognitive, normative and regulative narratives. These narratives are characterized by a commercial, sales-related discourse, which aims to “sell” social procurement to other actors. In addition, social procurement stem from a logic of creating social value, rather than commercial value. This means that these sale-focused narratives are also coupled with “emotion work”, where actors working with social procurement emphasize the individual disadvantaged people targeted in the implementation of social criteria, and argue for these people’s personal benefit. The combination of drawing upon well-established logics to provide rational narratives and to engage in emotion work by “personalizing” social procurement may enable these social criteria to become “business as usual” in the construction sector. This paper contributes insight into how language influence the spread, legitimization, and attempted institutionalization of a novel phenomenon. The findings point to the discursive strategies actors use when they try to implement social procurement, and thereby provide insight into a scarcely investigated phenomenon which is currently unfolding in the construction sector.