Walk the talk: how procurement professionals' interpretations shape social sustainability cascading

Purpose Procurement professionals shape how firms translate their commitments to social sustainability into supplier-facing governance, which can vary markedly, even within the same firm. This study explains this variation by theorizing how procurement professionals interpret their role and translate engagement with suppliers into governance practices. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on constructivist grounded theory and interviews with 27 professionals across organizational contexts. The analysis combines iterative coding, constant comparison, theoretical sampling, and abductive engagement with sensitizing literature. Findings The study develops a process model that explains cascading depth from a people-centric perspective. The interviewed procurement professionals differed on whether they construed their remit to include social sustainability, whether supplier-facing action appeared worth pursuing, and whether more improvement-oriented engagement appeared feasible. This situated judgment shaped whether cascading is enacted predominantly through procedural compliance or through more generative supplier-facing practice. Prospective paradoxical sensemaking helped explain how more generative supplier-facing responses could remain actionable under competing commercial demands, as professionals saw anticipated social and commercial consequences as relevant to their judgment in the present. Originality/value The study reframes cascading depth as a matter of how procurement professionals enact governance mechanisms. It specifies interpretive and relational conditions that remain underexplored in the literature on sustainable behavioral supply chain management. It extends paradoxical sensemaking research on how tensions are framed to include how more generative responses may be established and sustained in practice.