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Public sector interest in social innovation is rapidly growing around the world. However, only recently has substantial empirical research emerged to support practice. Through combining Community Economies research methods with emerging new public governance literature, this thesis makes a unique contribution to the field. A language politics is de...
Citations
... employment opportunities it offers (Loosemore, et al., 2022). The most common approach is the insertion of clauses in government contracts requiring construction companies to create training/employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups within building projects (Loosemore, et al., 2016;McNeill, 2017). Construction companies can either directly employ these groups or engage specialist organisations to do so. ...
In Australia, 9.4% of young people aged 15–24 are unemployed, more than double the national rate. The national employment services system in Australia has, however, not successfully tackled this issue. While some wraparound programs have been implemented to better address young people's needs, most are designed to find young people any job rather than being tailored towards a specific career. Despite governments encouraging solutions that involve cross‐sector collaboration with private businesses, the potential of industry‐specific solutions has been less well‐explored. Addressing this gap, this paper presents an in‐depth case study of how one major Australian construction company has implemented an industry‐specific collaborative wraparound program to address youth unemployment, called the Connectivity Centre model (CCM). The paper discusses the features of this model that make it distinctive compared to other programs supporting young people's employment. It also discusses how the policy context of social procurement (policies generating social value through procurement processes) and cross‐sector collaboration incentivise the model. The policy implications are explored, highlighting how models like the CCM offer a complementary alternative to other unemployment supports available to young jobseekers in Australia.
Points for practitioners
Social procurement policies incentivise private companies’ involvement in youth unemployment programs, including utilising their cross‐sector networks.
Private companies’ involvement enables youth unemployment programs that reflect the same benefits as wraparound programs in intensive/personalised support while providing more industry specificity.
This set of characteristics is unique and complementary within Australia's youth unemployment support landscape.
... They need support from many parties to start their new life. Thus, some study reported that the most successful method for supporting ex-offenders into employment are those which involve collaboration between governments, employers, non-government organization (NGO) and communities (McNeill, 2017). For example, government policies encourage collaboration, such as social procurement, have become a cornerstone of contemporary public policy in many countries, with the construction industry being a major focus (Loosemore, Bridgeman, & Keast, 2020;Raiden, Loosemore, King, & Gorse, 2018;Barraket, Keast, & Furneaux, 2016). ...
Employing Ex-Offenders has become one of the controversial topics of discussion these days. The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of hiring and supporting ex-offenders to re-join society and the workforce. The information for this paper was collected using published articles and news reports. The objective of this study is to encourage employers to hire Ex-offenders to be a part of society after taking part in rehabilitation training and discuss the advantages and challenges they face while returning to society. Therefore, to learn more about how NGOs and Governments are helping the ex-offenders to join the labour force and society. This study further revealed numerous factors that can positively influence effective reintegration from prison to community. Moreover, definitions of important key terms will help the reader understand this study's primary objective.
... Social procurement involves the deliberate creation of social value by purchasing goods and services [1]. While this idea is not new [2], McNeill [3] conceptualised social procurement as a social innovation because it strategically repositions the procurement function as a tool for addressing an organisation's social objectives through the creation of new hybrid assemblages between organisations in the public, private and third sectors. ...
... Although many construction researchers have recognised the vital role of champions in driving construction innovation, this research has been largely confined to the implementation of economic, technological, and environmental innovations [15][16][17][18][19]. While both Barraket et al. [1] and McNeill [3] recognise the critical role of organisational champions in driving social procurement, they do not elaborate on the functions of such roles. Aside from the work of Troje and Gluch [10,11] and Troje and Andersson [8], there has been little research into the role of social innovation champions in implementing social innovations, such as social procurement, in the construction industry or in other industry contexts. ...
There has been a recent proliferation of social procurement policies in Australia that target the construction industry. This is mirrored in many other countries, and the nascent research in this area shows that these policies are being implemented by an emerging group of largely undefined professionals who are often forced to create their own roles in institutional vacuums with little organisational legitimacy and support. By mobilising theories of how organisational champions diffuse innovations in other fields of practice, this paper contributes new insights into the evolving nature of these newly emerging roles and the motivations which drive these professionals to overcome the institutional inertia they invariably face. The results of semi-structured interviews, with fifteen social procurement champions working in the Australian construction industry, indicate that social procurement champions come from a wide range of professional backgrounds and bring diverse social capital to their roles. Linked by a shared sense of social consciousness, these champions challenge traditional institutional norms, practices, supply chain relationships, and traditional narratives about the concepts of value in construction. We conclude that, until normative standards develop around social procurement in the construction industry, its successful implementation will depend on external institutional pressures and the practical demonstration of what is possible in practice within the performative constraints of traditional project objectives.
... Parise and Casher (2003) also note that organisations are often pressured to form partnerships by external imperatives while co-existing in competitive environments outside the arrangement. As Dean (2013), Bromley and Meyer (2017), McNeill (2017) and Caldwell et al. (2017) have pointed out, cross-sector partnerships are not naturally occurring phenomenon since they involve the merging of numerous and often competing organisational missions, goals, values and logics. Therefore, the odds are heavily stacked against success and ambiguity about roles, inter-organisational conflicts, contested leadership and misaligned institutional mandates, and drivers can easily interfere with the smooth running of any social alliance, causing them to be neglected in pursuit of individual interests. ...
Purpose
Social procurement policies are an emerging policy instrument being used by governments around the world to leverage infrastructure and construction spending to address intractable social problems in the communities they represent. The relational nature of social procurement policies requires construction firms to develop new collaborative partnerships with organisations from the government, not-for-profit and community sectors. The aim of this paper is to address the paucity of research into the risks and opportunities of entering into these new cross-sector partnerships from the perspectives of the stakeholders involved and how this affects collaborative potential and social value outcomes for intended beneficiaries.
Design/methodology/approach
This case study research is based on a unique collaborative intermediary called Connectivity Centre created by an international contractor to coordinate its social procurement strategies. The findings draw on a thematic analysis of qualitative data from focus groups with 35 stakeholders from the construction, government, not-for-profit, social enterprise, education and employment sectors.
Findings
Findings indicate that potentially enormous opportunities which social procurement offers are being undermined by stakeholder nervousness about policy design, stability and implementation, poor risk management, information asymmetries, perverse incentives, candidate supply constraints, scepticism, traditional recruitment practices and industry capacity constraints. While these risks can be mitigated through collaborative initiatives like Connectivity Centres, this depends on new “relational” skills, knowledge and competencies which do not currently exist in construction. In conclusion, when social procurement policy requirements are excessive and imposed top-down, with little understanding of the construction industry's compliance capacity, intended social outcomes of these policies are unlikely to be achieved.
Originality/value
This research draws on theories of cross-sector collaboration developed in the realm of public sector management to address the lack of research into how the new cross-sector partnerships encouraged by emerging social procurement policies work in the construction industry. Contributing to the emerging literature on cross-sector collaboration, the findings expose the many challenges of working in cross-sector partnerships in highly transitionary project-based environments like construction.
The role of the societies and their interaction with public administration is changing toward ever closer co-operation. Since 2009 scientific literature and the public administrations themselves have been increasingly exploring the changing and dynamic role of the recipient of public services, a client or a customer, as that of a partner in the provision of public services. In this article the authors propose a policy client-accordance index (PCAX) methodology to measure the relevance of a) policy planned results and policy-makers’ expectations in relation to b) clients’ intentions, and explore the co-production in the age of digitalization based on a case study. The idea of the article is to contribute to this necessity of new tools and approaches to facilitate the co-operation and co-production between policy makers and society. The main goal of the research is to analyse the applicability and challenging aspects of the feasibility of PCAX and to test the possible transfer of the developed methodology model for evaluating the relevance of any public administration policy to the intentions of the policy‘s respective target group, i.e., the client-accordance index of a given public policy. In the first and the second chapters of the article, mostly based on the findings of scientific literature analyses, the authors explore the increasing topicality and the need of changing awareness of a public a service and its provision. Further in-depth analyses are conducted on the possible methodological tool to measure the relevance between the policy makers’ decisions (expectations) and society‘s needs and intentions. In the concluding chapter of the article the authors summarize the development dynamics of societal reforms towards co-production, main implementation aspects of the concept and remarks on PCAX backed up by the findings of the approbation of PCAX elements in the actual case study.
The construction industry is the primary focus for social procurement policies in many countries. However, there has been little research into the drivers of social procurement policy adoption in this industry. To help address this gap in research, this paper reports the results of semi-structured interviews with fifteen social procurement professionals who are implementing social procurement into the Australian construction industry. Results reveal interesting historical parallels with the implementation of environmental sustainability initiatives. However, social procurement has yet to become normalized. There appears to be a high level of homogeneity in industry practice and while there is considerable scope for innovation, this is constrained by the prescriptive and ‘top-down' nature of social procurement policies in Australia which make it difficult for organizations to respond ‘bottom-up’ to actual community needs. It is concluded that the considerable untapped potential of social procurement policies to create social value currently depends on the intrapreneurial efforts of a small number of emerging social procurement professionals who are individually challenging the many institutional norms and practices which undermine the implementation of these policies into the construction industry.
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.
International migrant and refugee numbers are at record levels and continue to grow. The construction industry is a major source of potential employment for migrants and refugees and emerging social and sustainable procurement policies in many parts of the world are also requiring construction supply chains to employ refugees and migrants as a condition of public sector contracts. However, there is virtually no research into the barriers that refugees and migrants face in seeking decent employment in the construction sector. Addressing this important gap in knowledge an exploratory survey of refugees' and migrants' job-seeking experiences in the Australian construction industry is presented. Results show that by far the greatest barrier to employment is lack of construction industry experience, followed by poor recognition of previous skills and experience. Recent migrants and refugees and those with the greatest previous experience of working in construction face the greatest barriers in finding decent work. Men from an Arabic background also experience greater difficulties than other cultural groups. It is recommended that policy-makers develop more initiatives to provide work experience and engage with construction employers about the challenges which refugees and migrants face in finding work in construction.
