Constructing Social Procurement: An Institutional Perspective on Working with Employment Requirements

Private and public organisations are increasingly using their purchasing power to mitigate societal issues and create social value. This is called social procurement. Due to problems such as segregation, unemployment, and social exclusion, social procurement in Sweden has focused on employment requirements. This is a type of criterion within social procurement that is used to create employment opportunities for marginalised long-term unemployed people, such as immigrants, youths and/or people with disabilities. These target groups often live in segregated neighbourhoods in run-down housing. This situation has led organisations in the Swedish construction and real estate sector to implement employment requirements in the procurement of their building and refurbishment projects and also in the facilities maintenance of the buildings, often hiring their own tenants. By hiring unemployed people to work with refurbishing their run-down housing, and supplying more labour to the construction sector, employment requirements have the potential to create social value for individuals, organisations, and for society. However, it is unclear how social procurement and employment requirements unfold in practice and what it means for the daily work of individual and organisational actors. Working with employment requirements can spur new ways of thinking and organising; create new roles, actors and responsibilities; create new practices, knowledge and coordination needs; and create new business opportunities. These new ways of thinking and organising, requires closer empirical, theoretical and conceptual examination. Therefore, this thesis aims to analyse how individual and organisational actors work with social procurement and how this work brings about institutional change processes that affect the everyday work of these actors. This thesis builds on a qualitative research design, mainly using interviews, where the practice-oriented theoretical perspectives of institutional work and institutional logics are applied to analyse how practices, roles, identities and norms change as a result of working with social procurement. The findings in this thesis make several contributions to both theory and practice. For social procurement research, in the context of the construction and real estate sector, this thesis adds rich details about what employment requirements mean for individual actors, and their professional roles, identities and daily work practices. The research also provides details on what enablers, drivers and barriers there are for working with employment requirements, as well as a discussion on which type of actors that are affected by these enablers, drivers and barriers. For the theoretical perspectives of institutional logics and work, this research adds insight and an empirical example of how a conflicting and disruptive institutional logic collide and mesh in a tightly regulated and institutionalised environment, and how a sustainable concept may become institutionalised despite considerable inertia, through the use of creative institutional work. Moreover, the research illustrates how actors differ in terms of the type of institutional work they conduct, and how these different kinds of ‘institutional workmanship’ interact. It also calls into question the role of intentionality in institutional work.For practitioners, the findings highlight what works well and less well when actors work with employment requirements. The identified barriers constitute a concrete list of areas in which adjustments can be made to enable an effective and efficient creation and dissemination of employment requirements and associated practices. For those already working with employment requirements today, the findings acknowledge the struggles that individual actors face when working with employment requirements, which can help legitimise their roles and practices and, by extension, the use of employment requirements

Can I Get Some Help Down Here? Inter-Project Support for Creating Social Value Through Social Procurement

Employment requirements, as an aspect of social procurement, can be used as an innovative way for construction organizations to create internships for marginalized unemployed people, in the process creating social value. However, how to organize and collaborate to implement employment requirements in construction projects is unclear. Therefore, this paper investigates how practitioners working operatively in projects perceive the support from and relationship with their parent company and client when they have to implement and work with employment requirements on a daily basis. Semi-structured interviews with 23 practitioners working in three projects in Sweden were analysed using a theoretical framework of project management focused on resources and collaborative relationships. Findings show how resources and support is often lacking, and how relationships with parent companies and clients are tenuous. There is a lack of knowledge and clear goals from the parent company and client which create uncertainty. The operative actors in the projects have to deal with this uncertainty without formalized routines, standardized information sharing, or enough resources, so to cope they create their own tools and practices. The paper provides a bottom-up perspective on social procurement and illustrates concrete areas where parent companies and clients must rethink their (lack of) resources and support. For research the findings indicate what factors make collaboration regarding social procurement difficult and contributes novel insight into a scarcely researched phenomenon

Face recognition under varying pose: The role of texture and shape

Although remarkably robust, face recognition is not perfectly invariant to pose and viewpoint changes. It has been known since long, that the profile as well as the full-face view result in a recognition performance that is worse than a view from within that range. However, only few data exists that investigate this phenomenon in detail. This work intends to provide such data using a high angular resolution and a large range of poses. Since there are inconsistencies in the literature concerning these issues, we emphasize on the different role of the learning view and the testing view in the recognition experiment and on the role of information contained in the texture and in the shape of a face. Our stimuli were generated from laser-scanned head models and contained either the natural texture or only Lambertian shading and no texture. The results of our same/different face recognition experiments are: 1. Only the learning view but not the testing view effects the recognition performance. 2. For the textured faces the optimal learning view is closer to the full-face view than for the shaded faces. 3. For the shaded faces, we find a significantly better recognition performance for the symmetric view. The results can be interpreted in terms of different strategies to recover invariants from texture and from shading

Beyond Policies and Social Washing: How Social Procurement Unfolds in Practice

Social procurement is increasingly used by organizations to create social value. An important feature of social procurement used to mitigate issues with social exclusion is employment requirements, which aim to create internships for unemployed marginalized people. However, little is known of their effects on people working at an operative level. Through 23 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the Swedish construction and real estate sector, this paper adopts a practice lens to analyse the effects of employment requirements (ER). Findings show that practitioners must handle the tension between old and new practices, and strike a balance between fulfilling formal responsibilities and performing new practices on an ad hoc basis, and finding the time and resources to do so. Practitioners act as practice carriers for both traditional work tasks and new employment requirement practices, which can lead to role ambiguity. The paper provides novel details for how employment requirements unfold in practice. It also adds to practice theory by suggesting an important relational aspect between first-order, premeditated practices, and second-order, emergent practices, and how both types of practices are vital for working with employment requirements

Promoting Children\u27s Health in the Home Environment: A Parent/Guardian Handbook

The World Health Organization (2003) stated that obesity is a global epidemic . The United States (U.S.) in particular has a statistically significant higher rate of obesity in children. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics (2003), 15.3% of children between the ages of 6 and 11 years old are obese as a result of unhealthy habits and routines. Because these habits and routines often begin in the home environment, health promotion activities should involve parents/guardians (Manios, Kafatos, & Mamalakis, 1998). At this time there are few resources available for parents/guardians and their children to promote wellness in the home environment. Parents/Guardians of 1st graders are targeted because research indicates that life-long habits have their roots in early childhood, (Manios, Kafatos, & Mamalakis, 1998, p. 604). The purpose of this scholarly project is to promote healthy habits and routines for first graders and their parents/guardians in their home environment that will continue with them throughout their lifespan. This scholarly project utilized a literature review to examine childhood obesity and determine the effectiveness of health promotion programs for children. The students utilized the Occupational Adaptation Model to guide the development of a parent/guardian handbook to promote healthy habits and routines in the home environment. The handbook provides activities and educational resources for parents/guardians to use when promoting healthy habits and routines in their 1st grade children

Populating the social realm: New roles arising from social procurement

Employment requirements, as part of social procurement, are increasingly used in construction procurement as a tool to mitigate issues of exclusion on the job market. To create a better understanding how employment requirements nurtures a new type of actor, here named the“employment requirement professional” (ERP), the aim of this paper is to study how this role is framed in terms of work practices and professional identity. Building on 21 semi-structured interviews in the Swedish construction sector, a detailed account of who works with employ- ment requirements, how and why they conduct their work is provided. The findings show how ERPs mediate between contrasting interests when they create new social procurement roles and practices; how they enact different approaches to promote social sustainability, how their roles are formed by multiple and reciprocal lines of actions, and how they make sense of who they are and what type of work they engage in. The research contributes to a discussion on effects from social procurement in construction and the emergence of a new professional role, their identity and work practices

What do you mean with “direction”? Local and global cues to biological motion perception in pigeons

AbstractBiological motion point-light displays are a rich and versatile instrument to study perceptual organization. Humans are able to retrieve information from biological motion through at least two different channels: The global articulated structure as revealed by the non-rigid, yet highly constrained deformation of the dot pattern, and the characteristics of local motion trajectories of individual dots. Here, we tested eight pigeons on a task in which they had to discriminate a left-facing from a right-facing biological motion point-light figure. Since the two stimuli were mirror-flipped versions of each other, we were not sure if the birds would be able to solve the task at all. However, all birds learned the discrimination quickly and performed at high accuracy. We then challenged them with a number of test trials introduced into the sequence of the normal training trials. Tested on backwards moving walkers, the majority of the birds indicated that they used local motion cues to solve the training task, while the remaining birds obviously used global, configural cues. Testing the pigeons on different versions of scrambled biological motion confirmed that each individual bird had made a clear decision for one of the two potentially available strategies. While we confirm a previously described local precedence in processing visual patterns, the fact that some birds used global features suggests that even the birds who relied on local cues probably dispose of the perceptual abilities to use global structure, but “chose” to not use them

Classifying faces by sex is more accurate with 3D shape information than with texture

Purpose: We compared quality of information available in 3D surface models versus texture maps for classifying human faces by sex. Methods: 3D surface models and texture maps from laser scans of 130 human heads (65 male, 65 female) were analyzed with separate principal components analyses (PCAs). Individual principal components (PCs) from the 3D head data characterized complex structural differences between male and female heads. Likewise, individual PCs in the texture analysis contrasted characteristically male vs. female texture patterns (e.g., presence/absence of facial hair shadowing). More formally, representing faces with only their projection coefficients onto the PCs, and varying the subspace from 1 to 50 dimensions, we trained a series of perceptrons to predict the sex of the faces using either the 3D or texture data. A "leave-one-out" technique was applied to measure the gen-eralizability of the perceptron's sex predictions. Results: While very good sex generalization performance was obtained for both representations, even with very low dimensional subspaces (e.g., 76.1 correct with only one 3D projection coefficient), the 3D data supported more accurate sex classification across nearly the entire range of subspaces tested. For texture, 93.8 correct sex generalization was achieved with a minimun subspace of 20 projection coefficients. For 3D data, 96.9 correct generalization was achieved with 17 projection coefficients. Conclusions: These data highlight the importance of considering the kinds of information available in different face representations with respect to the task demands