Purpose

The adoption of social procurement, the emerging practice of using a firm's spending power to generate social value, requires buying firms to navigate conflicts of institutional logics. Adopting an institutional work perspective, this study aims to investigate how buying firms change their existing procurement institutions to adopt and advance social procurement.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors conducted an in-depth case study of a social procurement initiative in the UK. This case study comprised of 16 buying firms that were actively participating in the social procurement initiative at the time of data collection (2020–2021). The data were largely captured through a set of 41 semi-structured interviews.

Findings

Four types of institutional work were observed: reducing institutional conflicts, crossing institutional boundaries, legitimising institutional change and spreading the new institutional logic. These different types of institutional work appeared in a sequential way.

Originality/value

This study contributes to various strands of literature investigating the role of procurement in generating value and benefits within societies, adopting an institutional lens to investigate the buying firms' purposeful actions to change procurement institutions. Secondly, this study complements the existing literature investigating the conflicts of institutional logics by illustrating the ways firms address such institutional conflicts when adopting and advancing social procurement. Finally, this work contributes to the recently emerging research on institutional work that examines the creation and establishment of new institutions by considering the existing procurement institutions in the examination of institutional work.

中文翻译：

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推进社会采购：机构工作视角

目的

社会采购是一种利用企业消费能力创造社会价值的新兴实践，它的采用要求采购企业解决制度逻辑的冲突。本研究采用制度工作的视角，旨在探讨采购企业如何改变现有的采购制度，以采用和推进社会采购。

设计/方法论/途径

作者对英国的社会采购计划进行了深入的案例研究。本案例研究由 16 家在数据收集时（2020-2021 年）积极参与社会采购计划的采购公司组成。这些数据主要是通过 41 次半结构化访谈获取的。

发现

观察到四种类型的制度工作：减少制度冲突、跨越制度边界、使制度变迁合法化和传播新的制度逻辑。这些不同类型的机构工作是按顺序出现的。

原创性/价值

这项研究为调查采购在社会中创造价值和利益方面的作用的各种文献做出了贡献，采用制度视角来调查采购公司改变采购制度的有目的行动。其次，本研究通过说明企业在采用和推进社会采购时解决此类制度冲突的方式，补充了调查制度逻辑冲突的现有文献。最后，这项工作有助于最近出现的关于机构工作的研究，通过在机构工作审查中考虑现有的采购机构来审查新机构的创建和设立。