Social Value in Practice

Ani Raiden, Andrew King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000472592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Business
• Index: Business

Social Value in Practice offers the reader a simple, accessible guide for considering, creating, and delivering social value in projects and within their organisation.

The book connects social value to the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and presents an insight into the many and different practical ways in which individuals and organisations can make a positive impact towards resolving the 'people, planet and prosperity' agenda:

• 'Good work' – good practice in managing people, including working conditions, and equality, diversity, and inclusion
• Education, skills, and employment, including apprenticeships and enhancing the industry image
• Social procurement and circular supply chains
• Strategic partnerships and social enterprises
• Community development, regeneration, and placemaking
• Construction consultancy
• Architecture, design, and construction
• Assessing and measuring social value.

Reflective practitioners can pick it up, turn to a chapter, and learn something they can use right away. Through numerous practical examples and think pieces, this book can help readers learn how to create social value, how to improve and build upon current practice, and how to co-create social value in partnership with clients and the supply chain. The authors aim to empower and inspire stakeholders to engage with new ideas and create more value for those using the built environment. This book is a must read for all those involved in procuring, tendering, planning, designing, developing, funding, building, working in, and managing the built environment.

Section II Co-creating social value

DOI: 10.1201/9781003024910-4

Having set out the current context for social value and the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the first section of this book, Section II focuses on discussing what considering, creating, and delivering social value look like within organisations. We draw on practical examples from a variety of contributions from practitioners involved in this work: contractors, clients, a developer, and a consultant.

We first discuss stakeholder analysis and managing relationships with stakeholders in Chapter 3. This is an essential aspect of social value good practice. In Chapter 4, we focus attention on one important stakeholder group in organisations: employees and workers. We discuss managing people and good practice in human resource management, which are the simplest ways to begin to embed social value into an organisation. In Chapter 5, we turn our spotlight onto apprenticeships, an oft-mentioned but arguably underexplored centrepiece of creating and evidencing social value. In Chapters 6 and 7, we discuss social procurement and circular business models, useful ways to extend the consideration, creation, and delivery of social value into the wider supply chain. We draw on examples from the UK, Lanzarote, and France to showcase developments in this increasingly important space.

In Chapter 8, Kevin Osbon provides insight into how a consultant approaches social value, including consideration of the Strategic Social Value Framework used by Focus Consultants, an SME based in the Midlands, UK. This is followed in Chapter 9 by a client’s perspective on social value. We draw on the experiences of South Yorkshire Housing Association, in Sheffield, UK as well as Alt-Erlaa housing estate in Vienna, Austria. In Chapter 10, James Willcox leads us through a contractor’s perspective, focused on Willmott Dixon’s considerable experience of social value.

We invite you to reflect upon these diverse perspectives on social value and consider how your professional practice relates to the SDGs. We hope that the many different contributions in this book offer an insight into the collective potential to achieve significant advances in social value and the SDGs.

3 Stakeholder analysis and managing relationships with stakeholders

Ani Raiden and Andrew King

DOI: 10.1201/9781003024910-5

In this chapter, we discuss stakeholder theory and explain how it can be employed to consider, create, and deliver social value. We outline the foundations of stakeholder analysis and relationship management and show the connection to social value through examples and links to case study details elsewhere in the book. We structure the discussion to focus on six different aspects to stakeholder management: identify stakeholders, categorise the stakeholders, develop a stakeholder matrix, undertake stakeholder mapping, maintain and manage the relationship, and continuous review and evaluation.

Stakeholder theory

Stakeholder theory suggests that productively managing relationships with stakeholders who affect, and are affected by, an organisation’s activities is central to value creation (Freeman et al., 2010). The theory has become a key consideration in business ethics, and it has also been influential in shaping and refining understanding of corporate social responsibility, and now stands as Principle 1 within the Seven Principles of Social Value (Social Value UK, 2020).

According to the stakeholder theory, understanding business is essentially about understanding the interactions within a network of relationships between different people and groups and how they help or hinder value creation. While in the past stakeholders may have been seen as a problem to ‘get past’, throughout this book, we demonstrate the benefits of analysing and actively managing relationships with different stakeholders via a variety of examples. We highlight how apprentices can be involved in organisational learning and development (Chapter 5) and how a client can involve end users (local residents) in project design (Chapter 9) to highlight just two exemplars.

For now, we turn to explaining the processes involved in stakeholder analysis and managing relationships with stakeholders.

Essentially, stakeholder management is an ongoing process that involves the following six aspects: identify stakeholders, categorise the stakeholders, develop a stakeholder matrix, undertake stakeholder mapping, and then focus on maintaining and managing the relationship, while continually reviewing and evaluating the information and relationships.

If this is your first time thinking about, or doing, stakeholder analysis, you may wish to proceed through the process in a linear fashion, one step at a time (see Figure 3.1). If you already have experience of managing stakeholder information and relationships, then the tools we present below may help you deepen your approach and better understand how to best manage the relationships.

Figure 3.1 Stages in stakeholder analysis and managing relationships with stakeholders.

Identify stakeholders

An important first step in stakeholder analysis is to identify the stakeholders relevant to an organisation or a project. This is set out as a high priority in the ISO 26000 guidance for social responsibility and features as an integral part of assessing and measuring social value (see Chapters 14 and 15).

The first output of identifying the relevant stakeholders might look like a relatively simple list of the internal and external, primary and secondary, stakeholders as shown in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1 Identifying relevant stakeholders – a simple example list of the internal and external, primary and secondary stakeholders for a construction contractor

	Primary	Secondary
Internal	Employees (it may be useful to break this down into relevant groups, for example, by organisational unit, or by contribution: managers, professional/specialist staff, operatives) Owners/shareholders (for private organisations)	Freelance workers Agency workers
External	Client/customers End users Communities Suppliers Consultants Financiers	Competitors Government Special interest groups Professional bodies Trade Unions Potential future employees Media

Note, however, that a stakeholder can be defined in a number of ways (Freeman et al., 2010):

Legal definition:	A narrow list of only those individuals, groups, and organisations that a firm has legal duties for, or a contractual relationship with, for example, a contract of employment or a contract for services.
Narrow definition:	Those groups without whose support the business would not be viable. These are often primary stakeholders.
Strategic view:	This view stresses what is good for the firm, seeking to identify stakeholders who are beneficial to its operations. It may include primary and secondary stakeholders.
Broad definition:	Any individual, group, or organisation that can affect, or is affected by, the organisation or its activities. This includes the secondary stakeholders.

It is important to remember that stakeholder analysis is a dynamic process and hence such lists ought to be ‘live’. As such, documents need to be continually reviewed and updated when changes occur in the internal workings of an organisation (for example, when there are structural changes or new projects are planned or initiated) or in the external environment. Many tools and documents can help with this ongoing activity of identifying relevant stakeholders, as shown in Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.2 Tools and documents for identifying stakeholders.

In the context of considering, creating, and delivering social value, Wyatt et al. (2019) highlight that the groups of people and organisations who have affected the organisation/activity (or will do), and those that have been affected by the activity (or will be affected by it) are most important. They also recommend involving stakeholders in discussions about stakeholder analysis (and specifically the impact you are likely to identify) to enable the resulting lists to be refined. As such, it is important to include all relevant stakeholders and possibly identify new stakeholder groups (people or organisations that you didn’t realise you influenced), and segments (or sub-groups) within your stakeholder groups (emerging due to differences in the outcomes experienced or the value/relative importance placed upon outcomes).

The ISO 26000 (clause 5.3.2) suggests that an organisation should ask the following questions in identifying stakeholders:

• To whom does the organisation have legal obligations?
• Who might be positively or negatively affected by the organisation’s decisions or activities?
• Who is likely to express concerns about the decisions and activities of the organisation?
• Who has been involved in the past when similar concerns needed to be addressed?
• Who can help the organisation address specific impacts?
• Who can affect the organisation’s ability to meet its responsibilities?
• Who would be disadvantaged if excluded from the engagement?
• Who in the value chain is affected?

As a starting point, we offer a list of some of the important stakeholders for so...