Advancing social procurement: an institutional work perspective
本研究通过英国16家企业的案例，揭示了采购企业如何通过减少制度冲突、跨越制度边界、合法化制度变革和传播新制度逻辑这四种制度工作来推进社会采购，对关注采购社会价值的管理者和学者有参考价值。
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.