Caring beyond compliance: how social procurement professionals reshape relational norms in construction projects

• Project managers struggle to satisfy contractual social procurement requirements. • Ethics of Care helps explain how Social Procurement Professionals (SPPs) reshape relational norms in projects to enable social value. • SPPs use humility, open-mindedness, holistic perspectives, and emotions to soften hierarchies that limit social value creation. • SPPs orientate their relational work on driving longer-term institutional change in the construction industry, beyond individual projects. Large construction projects are increasingly required to create social value through social procurement. Yet project managers often struggle to fulfil these contractual obligations due to industry norms that undermine the relational practices on which social value creation depends. Using Ethics of Care theory and drawing on semi-structured interviews with fifteen Social Procurement Professionals (SPPs) in the construction industry, this paper investigates whether and how SPPs practice care, and how a caring relationality challenges the transactional, rationalist norms that otherwise prevent projects from creating social value. Thematic analysis shows that to create social value, SPPs foster trust, reciprocity, and collaboration among webs of project actors by evoking their emotions, moral responsibility, holistic perspectives, and long-term commitment to change. In doing so, SPPs act as intermediaries who work on shifting relational norms in projects towards greater inclusivity and care. The findings suggest that while SPPs often remain marginal and under-resourced in project structures, they play a critical role in shifting how projects create social value, thus offering new insights for both project management scholarship and practical implementation of social procurement.