In procurement, social sustainability often becomes visible when something has already gone wrong: unsafe working conditions, labour exploitation, unclear subcontracting chains, wage violations, or supplier practices that do not match the buyer’s code of conduct.
The traditional response is often to add more requirements, more audits, or more supplier declarations. Those tools are important, but they are not enough on their own. Sven-Anders Stegare’s dissertation at the Stockholm School of Economics shows that social sustainability in procurement is not mainly solved by one tool or one decision. It develops over time through how procurement professionals manage tensions, build relationships, create room for action, and influence the systems in which supplier risks arise.
In this article, we connect those conclusions to the LHTS Procurement Framework and explain what they mean for procurement professionals in practice.
LHTS framework connection
Primary procurement role: Management
Supporting roles: Tactical procurement and operative procurement
Main process connection: Category management, Strategic sourcing, supplier qualification, contracting, supplier management, and supplier development
Learning level: Expert
Related course: The True Role of Procurement
Quick answer: What does social sustainability mean in procurement?
Social sustainability in procurement means that buying decisions consider how people are treated across the supply network. This includes labour rights, working conditions, health and safety, non-discrimination, responsible employment, and human well-being in the supplier base.
The important lesson from the dissertation is that procurement cannot rely only on supplier codes of conduct, audits, or contractual clauses. Procurement must also manage commercial tensions, build trust-based supplier relationships, involve internal stakeholders early, and influence the broader market and subcontracting structures that create risk.
Why social sustainability is a procurement issue
Procurement sits between internal business needs and external supplier markets. Through sourcing strategy, supplier selection, contracting, and performance management, procurement influences how cost, risk, responsibility, and value are distributed across the supply network.
This is why social sustainability is not only a sustainability department issue. It is also a procurement issue.
A buyer may not directly manage the workers employed by a subcontractor. But procurement decisions can still influence the conditions under which those workers are employed. For example, tight delivery schedules, aggressive price pressure, unclear subcontracting rules, weak follow-up, and short-term supplier relationships can all increase social risk.
The dissertation highlights that social sustainability risks often persist even when formal policies and monitoring systems exist. In many cases, audits identify risks, but the organisation still struggles to act because responsibility is fragmented, coordination across supplier tiers is limited, or incentives are misaligned.
This is where the Procurement Framework becomes useful. It helps procurement professionals see where social sustainability must be built into the process, instead of added as a separate control at the end.
Connecting the dissertation conclusions to the Procurement Framework
The dissertation can be translated into three practical procurement conclusions.
1. Procurement must manage tensions, not pretend they disappear
Social sustainability often creates tensions. A supplier with better labour practices may not be the cheapest. A deeper audit may delay a sourcing project. A stricter subcontracting requirement may reduce the available supplier base. A long-term development initiative may conflict with short-term savings targets.
The dissertation describes these as recurring and interdependent tensions. Procurement professionals do not solve them once and for all. They manoeuvre between them through judgement, prioritisation, and adaptation.
In the Procurement Framework, this connects especially to:
Need definition: Is social sustainability part of the business requirement, or only a later compliance check?
Sourcing strategy: Is the category strategy designed only for price competition, or also for risk reduction and supplier development?
RFQ and evaluation: Are social criteria weighted, verified, and connected to award decisions?
Contracting: Are expectations clear, practical, and possible to follow up?
Supplier management: Are risks discussed continuously, or only during audits?
The practical message is simple: social sustainability needs to be treated as a procurement decision factor from the beginning.
2. Procurement needs manoeuvring space
One of the most useful concepts in the dissertation is manoeuvring space. This means the room procurement has to act when social sustainability risks are visible but difficult to address.
That room is not fixed. It is created through supplier relationships, how internal stakeholders understand the tension, and the organisational conditions around procurement. The dissertation explains that manoeuvring space is shaped by relational dynamics, tension construction, and contextual conditions.
In practical procurement work, manoeuvring space grows when procurement:
- is involved early in sourcing and project decisions,
- has access to relevant supplier and subcontractor information,
- can discuss social risks with suppliers without immediately turning the relationship into a blame exercise,
- has support from legal, sustainability, operations, finance, and senior management,
- can connect social sustainability risks to business risk, operational risk, and reputational risk.
It shrinks when procurement is involved too late, measured only on price, forced into short timelines, or expected to solve social risk without authority, budget, or cross-functional support.
For LHTS, this is an important framework lesson: good procurement is not only about using the right template. It is also about creating the conditions where the right decision can be made.
3. Procurement can become a systemic intervenor
The dissertation’s most strategic conclusion is that procurement can act as a systemic intervenor. This means procurement can influence not only individual suppliers, but also the system conditions that create social sustainability risk.
This is especially relevant in categories with complex subcontracting, labour intermediaries, temporary labour, low margins, fragmented responsibilities, and strong price pressure. The dissertation shows that risks may be reproduced by the way the market works, not only by the behaviour of one supplier.
In the Procurement Framework, this connects to:
Category management: Identify structural social risks in the category, not only supplier-specific risks.
Supplier market analysis: Understand subcontracting patterns, labour models, and market incentives.
Supplier qualification: Assess the supplier’s ability to control its own suppliers and labour practices.
Contract model: Avoid contract structures that push risk and cost pressure into lower tiers.
Supplier relationship management: Work with key suppliers, industry peers, and external stakeholders to improve transparency and standards.
Continuous improvement: Use supplier data, audits, incidents, and dialogue to improve future sourcing decisions.
This shifts procurement from a reactive compliance role to a more proactive stewardship role.
How this connects to the procurement role
This article is primarily connected to the Management role because the topic involves governance, priorities, category strategy, supplier-market structure, organisational alignment, and long-term procurement maturity.
However, the tactical and operative roles are also important.
The tactical procurement role translates social sustainability into sourcing strategy, RFQ requirements, evaluation criteria, contract clauses, supplier selection, and supplier development plans.
The operative procurement role can identify warning signals in daily supplier contact, such as repeated delivery problems, unusual subcontractor changes, unclear documentation, urgent requests, or deviations from agreed processes.
The key point is that social sustainability cannot sit only at policy level. It must be connected to decisions and behaviours across all procurement roles.
Practical example: Construction supplier with subcontracting risk
Imagine a procurement team sourcing services in a category where subcontracting is common. The supplier market is cost competitive, delivery deadlines are tight, and the buyer has limited visibility beyond the first-tier supplier.
A traditional approach might include a supplier code of conduct, a contract clause, and an annual audit.
A Procurement Framework approach would go further:
During need definition, the buyer clarifies that visibility over subcontractors is a requirement, not a preference.
During market analysis, the team maps common subcontracting models and identifies where labour risk is likely to occur.
During RFQ, suppliers must explain how they select, approve, and monitor subcontractors.
During evaluation, price is assessed together with transparency, governance, labour-risk controls, and willingness to participate in joint improvement.
During contracting, subcontracting rules, reporting obligations, escalation paths, and audit rights are made clear.
During implementation, procurement, operations, legal, and sustainability agree who follows up what.
During supplier management, the buyer uses dialogue, data, site observations, audits, and corrective action plans to improve practices over time.
This is the difference between adding social sustainability as a document and embedding it into the procurement process.
Common mistakes in social sustainability procurement
Mistake 1: Treating audits as the solution.
Audits can reveal problems, but they rarely solve structural causes by themselves. The dissertation shows that social risks may persist despite formal governance mechanisms such as audits, contractual requirements, and codes of conduct.
Mistake 2: Managing social sustainability too late in the process.
When procurement is involved only after the specification, budget, supplier list, and timeline are already fixed, the room for action is limited.
Mistake 3: Separating cost and social sustainability completely.
Cost pressure is often part of the risk. Procurement needs to discuss how price models, delivery expectations, and contract terms affect supplier behaviour.
Mistake 4: Assuming first-tier supplier control is enough.
Many social risks occur further down the supply network. Supplier qualification should therefore include how the supplier manages subcontractors and labour intermediaries.
Mistake 5: Making social sustainability only a sustainability department responsibility.
Social sustainability must be integrated into procurement governance, category management, sourcing decisions, contracts, and supplier management.
Practical checklist for procurement professionals
Use this checklist when reviewing a category, sourcing project, or supplier relationship:
- Have we identified where social risk may occur in the supplier network?
- Are social sustainability requirements included already in the need definition?
- Have we considered how price pressure and delivery timelines may affect labour conditions?
- Do our RFQ and evaluation criteria make social sustainability visible in the award decision?
- Do we understand the supplier’s subcontracting model?
- Are contract requirements practical, measurable, and followed up?
- Do we have open dialogue with key suppliers about sensitive risks?
- Is procurement involved early enough to influence the solution?
- Are legal, sustainability, finance, operations, and procurement aligned?
- Are we learning from audits, incidents, and supplier dialogue to improve the next sourcing process?
Related LHTS course
Want to build a stronger foundation in responsible sourcing and supplier management? The Learn How to Source course on The True Role of Procurement gives you the structured knowledge to connect strategic goals with practical procurement decisions.
FAQ
What is social sustainability in procurement?
Social sustainability in procurement means considering labour conditions, human rights, health and safety, non-discrimination, and responsible employment practices across the supplier base.
Is social sustainability mainly about supplier audits?
No. Audits are useful, but they are only one part of the process. Social sustainability also depends on sourcing strategy, supplier selection, contract design, supplier relationships, internal alignment, and market conditions.
Where does social sustainability fit in the procurement process?
It should be included from the start: need definition, market analysis, sourcing strategy, RFQ, evaluation, contracting, implementation, supplier management, and continuous improvement.
Which procurement role owns social sustainability?
The primary ownership often sits with procurement management, but tactical buyers and operative buyers also play important roles. Tactical procurement builds social sustainability into sourcing and supplier management, while operative procurement can detect risks in daily supplier interaction.
Why is social sustainability difficult to manage?
It is difficult because risks are often hidden in multi-tier supplier networks, subcontracting structures, labour intermediaries, and conflicting commercial pressures. Procurement must often act without full visibility or full control.
Conclusion
The main lesson from Sven-Anders Stegare’s dissertation is highly relevant for LHTS: procurement’s contribution to social sustainability is not limited to policies, audits, or codes of conduct. Procurement creates impact through the way it manages tensions, builds relationships, creates room for action, and engages with the wider systems where supplier risks are created.
For procurement professionals, the practical next step is to review where social sustainability currently enters the procurement process. If it only appears at the contract clause or audit stage, it is too late. Strong procurement practice brings it into the framework from the beginning.
Extra reading: Practical recommendations — how procurement can act as a systemic intervenor
Paper 4 in Sven-Anders Stegare’s dissertation adds an important practical message: procurement should not only react to social sustainability risks after they appear. It should also influence the system conditions that allow those risks to continue. In high-risk supply networks, especially where subcontracting, labour intermediaries, price pressure, and fragmented responsibility are common, audits and contract clauses are necessary but not sufficient. The paper argues that effective procurement intervention must also address information flows, governance structures, shared rules, and underlying industry norms.
1. Align expectations across the industry
The first recommendation is to strengthen industry embeddedness. This means that procurement should not work alone. Social sustainability risks often sit between buyers, suppliers, subcontractors, authorities, unions, clients, and industry bodies. When each actor uses different requirements, audit models, and follow-up expectations, suppliers face fragmented signals and irresponsible actors can move between projects with limited consequences.
In practice, procurement can support:
- joint audits,
- harmonised reporting frameworks,
- shared supplier expectations,
- regulatory dialogue,
- coordinated industry initiatives,
- common definitions of acceptable labour practices.
For the Procurement Framework, this belongs mainly in category management, supplier market analysis, and procurement governance. The aim is to make social sustainability a shared market expectation, not only a company-specific requirement.
2. Build transparency that can scale across supplier tiers
The second recommendation is to improve industry scalability. Social sustainability practices often fail because they remain local: one project, one supplier, one audit, one contract. Paper 4 highlights the need for shared transparency structures that allow responsible practices to travel across projects, firms, and supplier tiers. Examples include centralised subcontractor databases, shared audit outcomes, joint risk-ranking systems, aligned audit protocols, and unified industry standards.
For procurement, this means asking practical questions such as:
- Do we know which subcontractors are actually used?
- Can we identify repeated risk patterns across projects?
- Are audit findings shared and reused, or are they lost after one project?
- Do suppliers face consistent expectations across buyers?
- Can high-risk suppliers simply move to another project without consequences?
In the Procurement Framework, this connects to supplier qualification, supplier database management, risk classification, framework agreements, and supplier performance management.
3. Strengthen procurement abilities
Paper 4 separates procurement abilities from procurement capabilities. Abilities are the human side of procurement: awareness, judgement, field experience, and the ability to recognise early warning signs. The paper points out that limited field exposure, uneven risk awareness, and reactive decision-making can weaken procurement’s ability to detect misconduct. Recommended actions include audit participation, cross-functional training, mentoring, and deliberate exposure to high-risk supplier environments.
For LHTS, this is an important learning point. A buyer cannot manage social sustainability only from a checklist. Procurement professionals need enough practical understanding to notice weak signals, ask better questions, and know when a supplier situation should be escalated.
Examples of warning signs may include unclear subcontracting chains, inconsistent documentation, unusually low pricing, repeated changes in labour providers, lack of site-level visibility, or reluctance to explain how workers are employed and managed.
4. Strengthen procurement capabilities
Capabilities are the organisational routines that allow procurement to act consistently. This includes risk-based supplier segmentation, predictive risk intelligence, targeted on-site audits, structured supplier base design, embedded sustainability governance, escalation pathways, early procurement involvement, integrated project coordination, and long-term supplier partnerships.
The key point is that social sustainability should not depend only on one experienced buyer noticing a problem. It should be built into the procurement system.
In practice, this means:
- define social risk categories by supplier type and category,
- prequalify suppliers before project pressure starts,
- use targeted on-site checks where document reviews are insufficient,
- create clear escalation paths when warning signs appear,
- involve procurement early in tender and project design,
- connect procurement, legal, HR, sustainability, and operations,
- build long-term relationships with selected suppliers where transparency and improvement are possible.
This connects strongly to strategic sourcing, supplier qualification, contract management, supplier relationship management, and supplier development.
5. Move from reactive compliance to systemic stewardship
The practical shift suggested by Paper 4 is from reactive compliance to systemic stewardship. Reactive compliance asks: “Have we included the clause, received the certificate, and performed the audit?” Systemic stewardship asks: “Are our sourcing decisions, price models, supplier relationships, information flows, and governance routines reducing or reproducing the risk?”
This does not mean that procurement can solve every social sustainability issue alone. It means procurement has leverage because it influences supplier selection, contractual expectations, subcontracting rules, follow-up routines, supplier relationships, and market behaviour over time. Paper 4 positions procurement as a function that can act not only on individual suppliers, but also on the wider system conditions that shape labour practices across supply networks.
Practical takeaway for procurement professionals
A procurement team that wants to act as a systemic intervenor should start with five practical questions:
- Where in this category are social sustainability risks most likely to occur?
- Which parts of our sourcing process may unintentionally increase those risks?
- What information is missing across supplier tiers?
- Which internal routines prevent us from acting early?
- Which external actors do we need to align with to create stronger industry expectations?
The main lesson is clear: social sustainability is not only controlled through audits. It is shaped through procurement decisions, supplier relationships, information flows, governance routines, and the commercial logic that procurement helps create.
Fredrik Axelsson reflection
As a final reflection, I would like to thank Sven-Anders Stegare for bringing these ideas into a context where procurement professionals can recognise their own reality. The strength of this work is that it does not treat social sustainability as a separate policy area, but as something that is shaped through sourcing decisions, supplier relationships, market structures, governance routines, and the daily trade-offs procurement teams must manage.
For Learn How to Source, this connects very well with the idea of procurement maturity. Professor Arjan van Weele’s maturity thinking helps explain why the recommendations in Paper 4 require more than good intentions. A procurement department at an early maturity level may be able to add contract clauses, request certificates, or perform audits. A more mature procurement function can go further: it can use category management, risk intelligence, supplier segmentation, cross-functional governance, supplier development, and market dialogue to influence the conditions behind the risk.
This is also why Sven-Anders’ concept of procurement as a systemic intervenor is so relevant. It challenges procurement to move from reactive compliance to active value creation and responsible market shaping. In that sense, Paper 4 is not only a contribution to research; it is also a challenge to procurement leaders to build the maturity needed to act.
Thank you, Sven-Anders, for bringing this important perspective to the procurement community. LHTS is already looking forward to your next publication.
