Social procurement as a catalyst for DEI in construction: some takeaways for HRM?

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives aim to create more diverse workforces and workplaces where all employees feel valued and reach their full potential (Levi and Fried, 2024). There is increasing acknowledgement that the success of such initiatives is affected by institutional environments and interactions of actors outside organisational boundaries such as power relationships between advocacy groups, governmental organisations, employer representatives, unions and civil society organisations (Kornau et al., 2022; Levi and Fried, 2024). An example of this is current backlash against DEI that has played out through political, consumer and media pressure (Sands and Ferraro, 2025) deriving from a range of contested issues and perspectives (Allen et al., 2025). However, most DEI research remains at the intra-organisational level (Zhao et al., 2025), with implementation responsibility typically falling within human resource management (HRM) departments. This paper positions social procurement as a promising new avenue for advancing DEI theory and practice through a commercial, collaborative and inter organisational approach. Its aim is to identify developments in this emerging field that can inform DEI practice in HRM. To do so, it explores the question of how social procurement professionals (SPPs) advance DEI through social procurement in the construction industry and how this differs from current HRM approaches.

Governments globally are increasingly turning to social procurement as a policy mechanism to promote DEI and address wider social and economic disadvantage (Ek Österberg and Zapata, 2023). This paper defines social procurement as the use of purchasing power to contractually incentivise suppliers to deliver social value, meaning positive impacts on people that extend beyond standard commercial or purely economic outcomes. This is achieved through workforce and supply chain diversification and inclusive employment (Troje and Andersson, 2021). Social procurement transforms what has traditionally been a mechanistic procurement function into a strategic one, serving as a powerful new source of economic leverage to drive DEI (Barraket et al., 2016).

Although social procurement has a long history (McCrudden, 2004), contemporary research advocates for the development of new professional roles to facilitate its implementation (Troje and Gluch, 2020). This paper uses the term “social procurement professional” to reflect the scope of these new roles. Recent research shows that SPPs employ a range of multi-disciplinary and multi-actor strategies to foster collaboration across sectors and organisational boundaries. As these roles typically fall outside an organisation’s HRM function (Troje and Gluch, 2020), social procurement remains absent from the two key streams of collaborative HRM that focus on internal people relationships (Lepak and Snell, 1999) and on mutual employer–employee commitment (Cregan et al., 2020). This, we argue, limits how DEI may be enacted across organisational boundaries.

The results of 15 extensive interviews with SPPs in the Australian construction industry are examined to explain their DEI-related activities. These are differentiated from current HRM-driven approaches, which have progressively addressed diversity management, equity and inclusion. This industry was chosen for its prominence as a target of social procurement policies globally, its economic significance and poor success levels in DEI implementation (Karim et al., 2025). Additionally, construction is known to have an intransigent view of an ideal worker (typically an able-bodied male) (Kuruneri and Zivanai, 2024).

The paper commences with a literature review that considers prominent approaches to DEI, highlighting the central role of HRM professionals in its implementation. It then discusses the benefits of adopting more collaborative HRM approaches to DEI, arguing that social procurement, informed by institutional, public value and collaborative governance theories, may offer broader application insights. The findings and discussion explore how social procurement aligns with and differs from current DEI theory and practice and may represent an effective response to some sources of DEI backlash. The conclusion proposes that HRM, in practice and theory, may benefit from a reconfiguration to a more externally collaborative model, such as social procurement.

Diversity management, a precursor to DEI, gained prominence in the 1990s, primarily as a response to backlash against mandated affirmative action (Agócs and Burr, 1996). Centred on a diversity business case, diversity management became popular for its potential to produce superior organisational outcomes through workforce diversity (Byrd and Sparkman, 2022). Diversity management aligns well with the tenets of strategic HRM by integrating HRM practice with organisational strategy and emphasising the importance of individual engagement (Liff, 1996). In contrast, DEI is a more recent approach that fosters bottom-up cultural change (Mor Barak, 1999), promotes inclusive behaviours that create belonging (Lirio et al., 2008), values employees’ unique differences and contributions (Shore et al., 2018) and enhances fairness through representation (Sands and Ferraro, 2025).

While institutional constraints are acknowledged (Kornau et al., 2022), systemic or institutional change remains widely viewed as essential for creating inclusive and equitable workplaces (Lundy et al., 2021; Mukupa et al., 2023). Research highlights the effectiveness of actor networks in achieving such institutional change (Hu et al., 2023). There has, however, been limited exploration of multi-organisational and collaborative approaches to complex DEI challenges.

Research on collaborative HRM falls into two streams, neither of which has been explicitly linked to DEI. The first stream presents collaborative HRM as a set of internally focussed practices with self-interested aims. It directs attention away from the individual to the interpersonal relationships between people (Lepak and Snell, 1999). The main aim of this approach is to develop internal capabilities enhancing collaboration within and across diverse teams (Engelsberger et al., 2024). As such this approach is inward-looking and enacted for organisational self-benefit. Authors have, however, extended this approach to consider the benefits of utilising the developed collaborative capability across organisational boundaries. Its focal purpose remains, however, on advancing corporate self-interest, typically through improved innovation (see, for example, Engelsberger et al., 2024). As such, this approach largely overlooks elements of reciprocity and mutual benefit, key characteristics of genuine collaboration (Gray, 1989).

The second stream of collaborative HRM is an advancement of the first approach through its potential to utilise developed collaborative capability for undertaking broader activities and achieving more expansive goals. This second stream is underpinned by “soft” or “ethical” HRM emphasising mutual commitment. It more explicitly acknowledges and considers inter-organisational collaboration in advancing employer outcomes, employee wellbeing (Cregan et al., 2020) and the potential for broader social and economic impacts (Stuart et al., 2021). Sarvaiya and Arrowsmith (2023), for example, examined collaborative relationships between HRM and corporate social responsibility (CSR) functions to provide social benefit. Their study found, however, that territorial structures and broader institutional factors may hinder the sustainability of such collaboration and limit its outcomes.

Both perspectives of collaborative HRM offer limited understanding of how DEI may be enacted across organisational boundaries, though the second stream holds greater potential. In contrast, social procurement may provide greater insights into how such collaborative efforts operate to deliver DEI outcomes more sustainably. This is because effective social procurement implementation requires inter- and intra-organisational collaboration with diverse actors from across supply chains, government and community-based organisations to deliver social value outcomes (Kuruneri and Zivanai, 2024). Achieving this is challenging in industries like construction that are seeking to address low success in DEI implementation (Karim et al., 2025). In such industries, barriers remain to the inter-organisational relationships on which effective social procurement depends (Meltzer et al., 2024).

Despite its growing relevance, social procurement remains under-theorised (Suchowerska et al., 2025). No singular framework currently guides its development; instead, it draws on a constellation of influences, including institutional theory, public value theory and collaborative governance (see, for example, Loosemore et al., 2021). Institutional theory posits that organisational practices are shaped by enduring norms, logics and structures that confer legitimacy (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). New institutional theory extends the analysis of institutions by foregrounding institutional work, the purposive actions of actors to disrupt, maintain or create institutions and their prevailing norms (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006). Public value theory (Moore, 2021) explains social procurement as a vehicle for government and other entities to co-create community-defined benefits, helping clarify why actors orient their practices toward producing public value in the form of equity, inclusion and opportunity rather than mere compliance. Collaborative governance theory (Ansell and Gash, 2008) extends the concept of public value by showing how collaborative practices in social procurement, for example cross-sector connectivity, shared decision-making, relational brokerage and networked implementation, make possible the joint production of value-driven DEI outcomes.

Social procurement’s conceptual hybridity reflects the complexity of social procurement’s operational contexts and social impacts and the novelty of its mechanisms. Social procurement demands different ways of thinking and working, drawing on collaborative practices that include expanding interpersonal skills, mutually developing micro-processes such as shared language and using intermediaries to facilitate cross-organisational and cross-sectoral collaboration (Barraket, 2019).

In this newly emerging, collaborative and dynamic policy environment, SPPs occupy an under-researched role and a nascent professional field of practice separate from HRM (Troje and Gluch, 2020). Studies indicate that working alongside but differently to HRM professionals, SPPs advance DEI in their supply chains by disrupting deeply embedded organisational norms and collaborating across sectors in a complex, often conflicted eco-system (Troje and Andersson, 2021). The limited research on SPPs shows that, in fostering cross-sector collaboration networks, they face challenges in addressing deeply ingrained institutional practices and in reducing institutional conflicts arising from reconciling market and social justice logics (Razmdoost and Alinaghian, 2023). Backlash to DEI has emerged from both sides of these competing logics, with some arguing it is overly driven by social justice and others that is too dependent on the business case, a tension that fuels objection to DEI initiatives (Byrd and Sparkman, 2022). This is especially true in the construction industry, where a very rigid, traditional view of relationships, organisations and individuals needed to undertake projects profitably prevails (Loosemore et al., 2020). This paper contributes to DEI research by examining how SPPs undertake DEI initiatives and how these initiatives differ from current HRM theory and practice. In answering these questions, this paper sheds light on market-based strategies that embed DEI through collaborative mechanisms. These insights lay the groundwork for systemic change, offering pathways to counter DEI backlash. The methodology below was designed to explore these dynamics.

To address the above research questions, we adopted Thorne et al.’s (1997) interpretive description approach, supported by a dual abductive–inductive analytical logic. Qualitative research increasingly recognises that abductive and inductive reasoning are complementary, enabling researchers to move iteratively between emerging empirical patterns and development of plausible explanatory accounts (Hammersley, 2023). This combined logic was therefore well suited to a study seeking to identify common experiences and underlying process shaping social procurement practice.

Using purposive sampling, we recruited participants with lived experience of implementing social procurement in major contracting firms in the Australian construction industry. Following Thorne et al. (1997), it was essential that participants’ accounts reflected experiences shared by a substantial portion of the SPP population. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 15 SPPs selected via snowball sampling due to the role’s relative novelty and inconsistent title descriptors (Troje and Andersson, 2021). Because no representative body of SPPs exists, the initial sample was purposefully drawn from a national community of practice of over 150 practitioners. Recruitment criteria required at least five years’ experience implementing social procurement across major government projects, the primary vehicle for social procurement in Australia and internationally.

The interviews explored individual perspectives on achieving DEI through social procurement, including implementation tactics, challenges, successes, drivers, personal motivations, structural positioning and attributes required for effective performance. To minimise researcher bias and, consistent with Thorne et al.’s (1997) guidance that collaborative interviewing enhances reflexivity and contextual insight, interviews were conducted by two researchers with backgrounds in public administration and construction. They shared responsibility for questioning, note-taking and observation, enabling interviewees to engage with different lines of inquiry and benefit from diverse interviewer perspectives (Bechhofer et al., 1984).

Guided by the principle of theoretical saturation (Saunders et al., 2018), data collection and analysis proceeded concurrently. The abductive–inductive logic allowed emerging insights to inform subsequent questioning while remaining grounded in participants’ accounts. Interviews continued until no new or relevant insights emerged, resulting in 15 interviews (Table 1). Although guidance on sample adequacy in qualitative research is limited, Guest et al. (2006) found that purposive samples of around 12 participants are sufficient to reach saturation when exploring common experiences within a relatively homogeneous group, consistent with the characteristics of this paper’s participants.

Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed by four team members with expertise in various fields, including construction, collaborative practices, HRM and DEI. With our research question as our analytical starting point and reflecting the exploratory nature of our research, we employed manual thematic analysis, informed by an inductive coding process in which codes and themes emerge directly from the data rather than from a pre-existing conceptual framework. Inductive coding was undertaken by each member of the research team immersing themselves in the data, comparing codes and key themes from their multiple disciplinary perspectives until a high level of inter-rater agreement was achieved (Braun and Clarke, 2006).

As discussed above, there has been little consideration of how DEI may be achieved through social procurement and how this differs from current approaches to DEI. This section offers insights into the characteristics and activities of SPPs in relation to existing understandings and practices of DEI. Analysis of data led to the development of three key themes: (1) a focus on institutional change, (2) a collaborative approach to disrupt institutional stasis and (3) principles that align with current DEI theory and practice, delivered through activities that challenge current HRM approaches. In presenting these three themes, we offer insights into new ways in which DEI is being delivered and how some characteristics of social procurement may help mitigate DEI backlash. In addition, this section provides a critical analysis of the processes SPPs undertake to enact DEI and deliver broader social value. We draw on early, underdeveloped and multiple theoretical perspectives on social procurement to inform this analysis. In doing so, we begin to lay the foundations for a more coherent and robust theoretical framework to guide future research in social procurement, DEI and collaborative HRM.

From an institutional theory perspective, the construction industry has historically been characterised by

1. deeply ingrained occupational roles and inter-personal and inter-organisational relationships which transfer from project to project (Lau and Rowlinson, 2010).

2. long established methods of procuring and valuing work which focus on economic rather than social criteria (Wong et al., 2000).

3. a lack of trust between purchasers and suppliers (Laan et al., 2012).

4. a homogenous workforce as generally accepted industry practice (Emuze and Smallwood, 2017).

At the organisational level, all interviewees acknowledged that their organisations were making institutional changes to varying degrees. In some organisations, new, distinctive social procurement roles were created, while in others existing roles were expanded to facilitate the process. SPPs came from diverse professional backgrounds and were located within various organisational divisions and at different hierarchical levels and functions. In practice, the primary responsibility for DEI falls to HRM; however, in this sample, no SPP worked within a HRM function. Similarly, in Sweden’s construction industry, many SPPs were found to have specialist procurement knowledge, located outside HRM and mainly within strategic business development roles (Troje and Gluch, 2020). These differences may reflect variations in country institutional arrangements, yet generally, the DEI function under social procurement is not considered an HRM responsibility:

The most progressive organisations had gone further than creating new roles and had restructured their organisations to accommodate a new social procurement function – although this was rare. One respondent likened it to a transformational change process driven by senior leaders and operationalised through a multi-level, multi-divisional approach. Leadership was widely agreed to be essential to bringing about the institutional changes supporting social procurement implementation:

A key feature that distinguishes social procurement from HRM-driven DEI is its active engagement of the supply chain, extending change from individual organisations to the wider industry. While engaging a supply chain to support DEI has been evident in corporate social responsibility research (see, for example, Prashar, 2025), social procurement extends engagement with the supply chain beyond determining and selecting ethical suppliers. Social procurement contractually requires a consideration of DEI initiatives and targets as part of tender and prequalification processes. These targets then provide the basis for monitoring and enforcement throughout the supply chain post-contract award and during project execution. Interviewees noted that the supply chain was generally at a low level of maturity in understanding social procurement and the value of DEI. Therefore, interviewees described undertaking foundational institutional work by educating and supporting the construction supply chain to comply with the DEI requirements of social procurement.

In building inter-organisational relationships, SPPs went even further by diversifying the supply chain to include non-traditional service providers (such as social enterprises and other minority organisations such as Indigenous businesses), including those that provide employment for targeted recruitment groups. This required new cross-sector collaborations that do not traditionally exist in the construction supply chain, as well as new forms of collaborative governance unfamiliar to construction project managers. Therefore, the role of SPPs in bringing these new relationships and governance expertise to their organisations was essential in implementing social procurement and diversifying supply chains effectively.

SPPs also sought ways to embed the changes made. For example, these new non-traditional suppliers were helped to compete for contracts through education and administrative assistance programs, with the aim of building their future capacity and ensuring their long-term competitive viability. This form of networked accountability differs from HRM’s compliance-based monitoring, instead distributing responsibility for DEI outcomes across the supply chain. In this way, SPPs were actively changing the institutional nature and composition of the construction industry long-term. However, the SPPs were also sufficiently pragmatic to recognise that there would be institutional resistance to these changes and that the industry’s competitive market logic was not about to be overturned. There were therefore concerns that non-traditional suppliers may be unviable within the industry should government withdraw support:

This vulnerability was further complicated by the project-based nature of the construction industry, as DEI targets are only applicable for the duration of each project. While the temporal nature of projects makes it easier to reverse DEI initiatives, SPPs sought ways to forestall such reversals. For example, one large infrastructure company began directly employing members of a target group through a training organisation, rotating them among its subcontractors to ensure consistent employment and project cohesion. Another organisation established an ongoing social procurement working group to transfer learnings and connections between projects. In this way, SPPs moved beyond compliance to best-practice DEI (Wickham et al., 2025), creating a new institutional environment sharing the intent of social procurement and coordinated across projects.

Ultimately, most participants agreed that the only way to embed DEI through social procurement in the long term was to make it “business as usual”. There was some apprehension that if concern for the welfare and development of target groups was not genuine, then social procurement’s aims to bring about socially impactful DEI would not be achieved. Without this, there was concern that social procurement could become a box-ticking exercise to meet diversity targets. There were variations in what the goal was, ranging from the need for economic viability within an existing system to more ambitious change that built social impact into all aspects of the business:

In driving sustainable change, SPPs were highly creative and innovative in their initiatives, often generating broader, ongoing opportunities in surrounding communities. An example was a project that faced transportation challenges for job seekers due to its busy and dense commercial location, with limited public transport and parking options. The local Indigenous Land Council was approached to establish a social enterprise to operate a bus service to transport workers to the site. The Land Council utilised this opportunity as a model for establishing future transport operations for their communities. These insights show that organisations are responding to new social procurement imperatives with progressive restructuring, creating new roles and embedding social procurement across organisations and communities. Unlike HRM-driven DEI efforts, social procurement reaches deep into the supply chain, mobilising new knowledge and including non-traditional providers, while also leveraging relationships and collaborating to disrupt industry norms.

Litvin (2002) noted, in a critical assessment of DEI initiatives, that powerful institutional constraints often prevent the development of alternative organisational realities. Within the construction industry, strong institutional logics and norms rooted in market efficiency, economic value, relational stability and a homogenous workforce have historically constrained DEI efforts (Troje and Gluch, 2020). SPPs support institutional change by introducing a countervailing relational and caring logic. This leverages new forms of cross-sector collaboration with the social sector, state authority, purchasing power and commercial incentives to reconfigure organisational norms for social benefit (Barraket et al., 2016).

Troje and Andersson (2021) describe social procurement as a proto-institution that significantly disrupts existing relationships and norms in the construction industry. The findings under this theme support and advance this work by showing how SPPs are undertaking institutional work to bring about these changes by reconfiguring industry composition and structures and overlaying them onto existing institutional logics. SPPs, however, are not undertaking such work alone, as discussed in Theme 2.

Collaboration emerged as a central means through which SPPs enacted institutional change through joint production of advanced value-driven DEI outcomes. What began as deliberatively enhanced relational practices, problem-solving and co-creating with others often evolved into more structured forms of collaborative governance and shared decision-making (Gash, 2016). Interviewees consistently emphasised the importance of relationships in co-creating innovative solutions, leveraging social networks within and beyond individual projects. These practices and their more formalised governance arrangements that grew from them not only facilitated implementation but also embodied inclusive values:

Such early-stage, cross-boundary co-design differs markedly from HRM approaches, which operate within organisational boundaries and rarely engage external partners in shaping workforce strategies. Fear of change and perceived threats to the privileges embedded in the long-standing institutional arrangements previously described are central drivers of DEI backlash (Iyer, 2022), often expressed through claims that “undeserved benefits” accrue to particular identity groups (Allen et al., 2025, p. 2) at the expense of those who have benefited from the status quo (Iyer, 2022). The process of public value creation contains within it a potentially powerful means to avoid backlash. Public value creation is increasingly understood as being achieved through collaborative negotiation between stakeholders who ultimately work together towards shared goals. SPPs engaged stakeholders, including subcontractors, as part of the solution design and, in doing so, gained their commitment. Having been part of the design solutions, Boaz et al. (2018) suggest it is difficult for stakeholders not to support such initiatives:

To progress their DEI objectives, SPPs operationalised collaboration through a range of informal and formal mechanisms. Informally, they invested time cultivating personal connections with stakeholders across sectors aligned with social procurement and DEI goals to forge a mutual direction. Few practitioners possessed all the necessary ties, prompting network expansion through informal exchanges and deliberate relational labour. Their activities thus pushed DEI practice and boundaries beyond the current potential of both collaborative HRM approaches covered in the two main research streams. Internally focused collaborative HRM limits its activities and benefits to single organisations while more externally focused collaborative HRM has not extensively overcome territorial structures and embraced the benefits of building and leveraging networks. This process of network expansion enabled cross-sectoral knowledge exchange, allowing SPPs to address complex social disadvantage by drawing on expertise from diverse domains:

Here again, the work resembles boundary-spanning collaboration rather than HRM, which does not typically involve constructing a multi-sector support system.

More formal processes for collaboration involved either adjusting existing project arrangements or creating new collaborative governance mechanisms. As an example of adjusting current practice, at project commencement, principal contractors often initiated community consultations to identify local priorities, embedding responsiveness into project design. Such collaborative actions demonstrate distributed leadership (Zaghmout and Harrison, 2025), modelling inclusion across hierarchical and organisational boundaries and reflecting social value creation through collaborative negotiation addressing social problems and achieving shared goals (Head, 2019):

These mechanisms move practice decisively beyond HRM-driven DEI, which focuses on internal workforce systems rather than shared governance arrangements coordinating multiple organisations. Also, unlike both forms of collaborative HRM, which typically operate within organisational boundaries and relationships, SPPs extend stakeholder engagement into existing market-facing processes, such as tendering and workshops, and then building new supporting collaborative governance structures. SPPs convene subcontractor workshops and pre-contract dialogues, not merely to align on DEI targets, but to cultivate capabilities and connections across sectors. While commercial self-interest is acknowledged, SPPs leverage procurement relationally, embedding inclusive practices through formal agreements and informal ties.

This duality of shared decision-making and engagement mechanisms moves social procurement practice more firmly into the realm of collaborative governance (Gash, 2016), generating the kind of networked accountability that can sustain DEI commitments beyond conventional HRM structures (Lee and Ospina, 2022).

Beyond traditional subcontractors, SPPs engaged collaboratively with non-traditional suppliers, focused on training and employment for marginalised groups. These collaborations were often informal, though in one instance, a dedicated intermediary was introduced to coordinate third-sector providers, thus implementing a new collaborative governance arrangement:

SPPs employed a range of mechanisms to build inclusive employer capability, including one-on-one meetings, coalitions of like-minded professionals and project working groups. These collaborative governance arrangements supported inclusive supervisory practices, tracked DEI progress and addressed implementation barriers. These cross-organisational structures differ from HRM’s formalised roles and fixed structures, enabling practitioners to reconfigure responsibilities in response to emerging needs. The fluidity of these arrangements also enabled adaptive role creation (Lee and Ospina, 2022), with many SPPs developing their own job descriptions and professional identities in response to emerging needs:

Collaboration acted both as a catalyst for change and as a core component of new institutional arrangements, reshaping project delivery through cross-sectoral knowledge exchange, collaborative governance, distributed leadership, adaptive role creation and networked accountability. These practices broke down the siloed nature of HRM and procurement, replacing them with fluid relational structures that challenge the construction industry’s dominant logic enabling DEI to be enacted across projects beyond the remit of single organisations or HRM alone.

These collaborative practices centre on emotional labour and care work, engaging communities that are often excluded from conventional DEI approaches managed traditionally by HRM. In contrast to collaborative HRM, which remains tethered to adjacent partnerships and under-theorises relational labour, SPPs reconfigure networks entirely, linking government, social enterprise and construction sectors. Their accountability is systemic and legislated, contrasting sharply with HRM’s inward-facing DEI metrics (Collins, 2021); their collaborative methods reflect a deeper, relational and institutional shift.

As Osborn and Hagedoorn (1997, p. 272) observed, “alliances and networks can be seen as experiments in institution building.” SPPs exemplify this, forging new relationships and routines that require not only a cognitive shift but also revised practices and structures. Their collaborative work reorients DEI toward social equity (Intindola and Stamper, 2023). In this way, social procurement is the collaborative mechanism through which new institutional logics are enacted, as well as a first-order outcome that forms the basis for other outcomes, including DEI.

Analysis of the interviews revealed a third theme, which demonstrates how social procurement practice aligns with DEI principles and contributes to delivering on broader commitments to the DEI promise. These findings show how social procurement extricates DEI from the confines of both strategic and collaborative HRM approaches.

Strategic HRM and its associated DEI practices aim to sustain organisational self-interest by developing an inimitable workforce whose talents differentiate an organisation from competitors (Collins, 2021). As a result, DEI tends to align with efforts to build firm specific human capital and is largely practised within organisational boundaries to protect competitive advantage. This inward-facing orientation is argued to constrain HRM’s capacity to address systemic social issues (Intindola and Stamper, 2023). Our findings indicate that achieving DEI through social procurement involves instilling transferable skills. In this way, social procurement meets not just organisational DEI goals but wider community-based social value and equity goals by making disadvantaged candidates job-ready and creating sustainable employment across multiple organisations and projects.

In building on the promise of inclusivity and equity within DEI, interviewees reported considerable effort to enhance new recruits’ ability to feel valued and add value by preparing target employees for employment, addressing individual barriers to sustainable employment. Pre-employment training was provided to enhance job readiness, with on-the-job training continuing to develop skills for safe, productive work, activities identified by Duong et al. (2024) as antecedents of perceptions of inclusion. However, skills acquisition alone was insufficient to foster workplace inclusion. Interviewees identified various barriers to successful participation that stretched existing DEI considerations, for example, lack of formal education, criminal records, cramped living conditions and food insecurity. Many individuals faced particular and sometimes complex issues that required highly tailored solutions:

SPPs acknowledged that their field of professional practice was in its early stages of development, they were learning as they went and were not necessarily equipped to address many of the more complex issues that frequently fell outside HRM-driven DEI. In their consideration of collaborative HRM, Zhou et al. (2013) proposed that HRM would benefit from a deeper understanding of its external stakeholders to draw on their capabilities to contribute meaningfully to organisational outcomes. SPPs achieved this through building new relationships and leveraging existing ones, working relationally by drawing on their networks to craft solutions addressing complex needs, often on a case-by-case basis, to better set candidates up for success:

Interviewees also noted that they often became personally involved in working with candidates or utilised their networks to nurture them in the workplace. Many voluntarily helped the candidates with personal issues such as housing, domestic abuse or interactions with the criminal justice system in their own time. Leadership, too, was relational and involved emotional support and engagement; it was about being actively involved and setting an example of how to do inclusion:

These examples of tangible relational actions undertaken by SPPs were specifically designed to address disadvantage and promote broader inclusion beyond traditional target groups. By acting in this way, SPPs address Kamalumpundi et al.’s (2024) call to reframe DEI as a tool for fostering inclusion and broad-based benefits, while also meeting Sands and Ferraro’s (2025) emphasis on demonstrating measurable actions authentically aligned with stated values. Additionally, this approach helped organisations move beyond symbolic, potentially performative efforts toward more substantive ones, as Nittrouer et al. (2025) argue. In these ways, social procurement can help mitigate backlash among individuals whose support for DEI is grounded in commitments to social justice and reducing inequality, for example by creating employment opportunities for people from historically marginalised groups (Iyer, 2022).

Social procurement incorporates elements of affirmative action, as it is predominantly a government-led initiative supported by targets for the employment of historically excluded groups. A strong business incentive backs these targets, as they carry the potential for significant commercial consequences, including the risk of becoming ineligible to participate in future multi-billion-dollar projects. Interestingly, SPPs often showed reluctance to use business case arguments to advance DEI, fearing they would not be seen as authentic. Most preferred to use only commercially based arguments when they experienced backlash, or as a last resort if all else failed. The ethical and reputational/business case quandaries of balancing commercial and social justice perspectives (Sands and Ferraro, 2025) were clearly evidenced in the interviews:

Through tendering, social procurement also aligns with elements of diversity management in that organisations have some leeway in interpreting requirements, developing social value outcomes and determining how such outcomes will be delivered. This provides opportunities for organisations to tailor diversity initiatives to their specific organisation’s needs and to identify the broader group interests that are served by DEI policies, which some evidence shows as countering backlash by helping to demonstrate that everyone benefits from DEI policies (Iyer, 2022). It is the balance between the business and social justice cases that social procurement brings, which helps deliver on the DEI promise by promoting inclusive behaviours, imbuing a sense of belonging for individuals (Lirio et al., 2008) while also benefiting organisational outcomes and protecting against negative commercial consequences. Ensuring the organisational benefits are clearly visible can be important in reducing resistance and backlash among advantaged group members (Iyer, 2022).

Sarvaiyar and Arrowsmith (2023) note the potential social benefits of integrating ethical HRM practices, particularly through aligning HRM with the organisation’s CSR function as part of a broader social initiative. They build on Guest and Woodrow’s (2012) argument, noting that delivering ethical HRM must go beyond reliance on the HR manager and advocate systemic, collaborative efforts to achieve meaningful outcomes.

An additional way in which social procurement provides helpful insights to address tensions between business and social justice cases for DEI is through its highly relational approach, which simultaneously builds narratives that appeal to both business and social justice audiences (Gillberg, 2024) potentially mitigating backlash from some in both audiences. This also helps address concerns raised by Byrd and Sparkman (2022) regarding how DEI practice currently overlooks the significance of relationships in creating value. Building on these insights to enhance value creation through relationships, thereby providing beneficial outcomes for all, can also help mitigate DEI backlash.

This paper contributes to scholarship on DEI by examining how social procurement serves as a novel mechanism for advancing DEI objectives. Specifically, it interrogates how social procurement diverges from conventional HRM theories and practices in delivering DEI, and whether it offers new pathways to mitigate backlash against DEI initiatives. Sectors such as construction exemplify the institutional tensions that arise when market logics collide with social justice imperatives (Razmdoost and Alinaghian, 2023), often resulting in resistance to equity-oriented change (Byrd and Sparkman, 2022).

In this context, social procurement emerges as a counter-institutional strategy that reframes DEI from a focus on intra-organisational differentiation to one of inter-organisational cross-sector collaboration and public value creation. It signals the emergence of a hybrid institutional logic, one that integrates commercial accountability with ethical and relational commitments. This logic is enacted through adaptive professional roles that operate beyond traditional HRM structures, suggesting a reconfiguration of how DEI is governed and practised. By foregrounding these dynamics, the paper offers a conceptual bridge between institutional theory, theories of cross-sector collaboration, collaborative HRM and public value scholarship. By doing so, it invites further research into the transformative potential of social procurement as a site of institutional innovation, as well as the role of SPPs in enabling this.

This paper advances an evolving theoretical landscape by elucidating how SPPs engage in institutional work (Lawrence and Suddaby, 2006), enact public value through distributed leadership and challenge dominant logics via relational accountability. Positioned as institutional entrepreneurs in a nascent, ambiguous field, SPPs operate beyond the conventional remit of HRM-led DEI initiatives. Their practices inhabit the terrain of collaborative, multi-stakeholder engagement, thereby extending the scope of collaborative HRM scholarship (Stuart et al., 2021).

While the first stream of collaborative HRM research, while largely inward-looking, has begun to explore inter-organisational dynamics, it remains largely oriented toward stakeholder alignment as a means of advancing organisational self-interest (Zhou et al., 2013). Even where the second stream of collaborative HRM has ventured into cross-organisational collaboration to promote broader social benefit (Sarvaiya and Arrowsmith, 2023), it has not sufficiently elaborated how to build, sustain, institutionalise and ultimately leverage extra-organisational networks. In contrast, the activities of SPPs offer empirically grounded illustrations of how HRM can engage in collaborative practice to generate broader social value and advance DEI objectives, including mitigating backlash.

Social procurement highlights that authentic collaboration is grounded in reciprocity and extends far beyond information sharing or occasional joint work; it requires ongoing, deeper engagement across sectors and organisational boundaries.

These findings illuminate pathways through which HRM can build strategic capacity and social relevance in the DEI space, not by reproducing dominant institutional logics, but by actively participating in their reconfiguration.

This paper is subject to several acknowledged limitations. The foremost constraint arises from its distinctive institutional context, which may limit the generalisability of findings to other domains, including mainstream HRM practice. Nonetheless, the specific activities undertaken by SPPs offer transferable and testable insights that challenge prevailing theoretical assumptions and operational norms, thereby enriching the conceptual and practical understanding of DEI within HRM.

A second limitation concerns the use of snowball sampling, which, while appropriate for accessing a dispersed and emergent practitioner community, introduces potential selection bias (Kirchherr and Charles, 2018). This method may have disproportionately captured the perspectives of willing participants, potentially skewing the data toward more favourable representations. To mitigate this risk and ensure robust, reliable conclusions, the paper employed several safeguards: systematic monitoring for bias, use of carefully structured interview protocols and triangulation of findings with existing literature. Given the limitations of our methodology, it would be useful to supplement our research with more in-depth case studies undertaking further analysis.

The evidence of the long-term success of social procurement in promoting positive DEI outcomes cannot be evidenced in this paper and will take time. However, this paper highlights the potential of an alternative DEI approach, encouraging further empirical research and theoretical debate on institutional change promoting DEI and on how HR can broaden its scope to generate wider social value. For example, our results show that the success of social procurement in advancing DEI depends on the commitment of numerous stakeholders. So, building on our results, it would be useful for future research to undertake more in-depth stakeholder analysis, exploring the roles each stakeholder plays, and the collaborative governance needed to build the relational capital required to work effectively together to advance DEI outcomes. Given the emerging nature of social procurement, it is crucial to understand the tactics and strategies practitioners use to advance DEI amid institutional resistance and to build inter-organisational relationships needed for effective implementation.