Construction Management and Economics

Social Value in the Built Environment: ‘Within’ and ‘Through’ the Construction Project Lifecycle

Introduction

The built environment profoundly shapes societal outcomes by affecting economic opportunity, public health, well-being, equity, inclusion, and everyday lived experience. The concept of social value has thus become a prominent concern across built-environment research and practice over the past decade. Policy and governance instruments—such as the UK Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012— as well as the growing prominence of corporate ESG frameworks have reinforced expectations that built-environment interventions should enable meaningful community benefits. These might include enhanced social inclusion, local employment and skills development, support for small and social enterprises, environmental sustainability, and the creation of healthier, more equitable places to live and work.

Despite its policy implications and growing prominence in industry discourse, social value in the built environment remains under-theorised, contested, and ambiguous (Raiden et al., 2019; Çıdık, 2023). Conceptual boundaries are blurred, with insufficiently distinguished terms, such as social impact, cultural value, and community benefit, while existing research predominantly reflects managerial and instrumental priorities. Scholars have identified a conceptual and empirical deficit: interest in social value is expanding, yet theoretical engagement remains shallow, and key questions about how social value is constituted and studied, by whom, and to what ends are insufficiently investigated (Watts et al., 2019; Çıdık, 2020).

This Special Issue frames construction projects as central to theorising social value in the built environment across different scales and timeframes, and invites contributions from scholars across disciplines. Specifically, it explores social value ‘within’ construction projects—how it is understood, negotiated, and practiced by diverse project actors including planners, designers, contractors, project managers, clients, and local communities—and ‘through’ construction projects—how projects relate to, shape, and are shaped by broader spatial, societal, and institutional systems. Construction projects thus represent dynamic settings across their full lifecycles (i.e., from planning and design through to use, reuse, and decommissioning) where multiple professional, organisational, and community agendas converge and where ideas of value are contested, translated, and realised in material, economic, social, and institutional forms.

To develop richer theoretical perspectives on social value in the built environment, this Special Issue positions construction projects as a meeting ground for inter- and multidisciplinary inquiry. It brings together scholars from architecture, urban studies, geography, labour and organisation studies, political economy, real estate, and other fields alongside construction management. We call for contributions that move beyond current emphases on case-based social value practices or performance benchmarking with limited theorisation. We seek papers that treat social value as a dynamic, contested, and generative concept, capable of deepening theoretical debates across the built environment and beyond.

Background

Early discourse framed social value as a liability placed on construction project decision-makers—planners, clients, and contractors—who were tasked with balancing economic, environmental, and social considerations. Existing research sought to retrofit social value into existing industry structures, often via top-down managerial mechanisms such as shared value (Awale and Rowlinson, 2014), social enterprise (Loosemore and Higgon, 2016), or corporate social responsibility (Murray and Dainty, 2009; Loosemore and Phua, 2010). Narratives supported a technocratic approach to social value focused on defining, measuring, strategizing and managing, yet offered limited opportunities for a more nuanced engagement.

In a similar vein, with the acceleration of policy mandates and requirements for social commitments in construction projects, social procurement has become a central mechanism that perpetuates this technocratic framing. Scholars have explored how procurement strategies can embed social value into project delivery through structured interventions such as local employment quotas, supply chain diversification, or contractual clauses requiring community benefits (Barraket et al., 2015; Murphy and Eadie, 2019). These studies have produced useful insights into implementation frameworks and institutional drivers yet have also highlighted an instrumental logic that treats social value as a set of deliverables—such as ‘points to earn’—to be operationalised through policy compliance and procedural accountability.

Specific policy drivers for social value vary across national contexts—for example, procurement-led in the UK and Australia, equity-focused in the US, and sustainability-driven in the EU. Despite this, research trajectories show strikingly similar patterns, moving from descriptive accounts and quantitative measurement in earlier research towards more critical and conceptual engagement more recently. Overall, this body of work has established a strong foundation to build upon and has broadened the empirical terrain of social value research. It has, however, also underscored two dominant research strands: descriptive and technocratic. Descriptive accounts offer empirical insights into stakeholder experiences or project narratives but often remain context-specific and under-theorised (Raiden et al., 2019; Cartigny & Lord, 2017). Technocratic approaches, meanwhile, prioritise quantified performance indicators, monetised impacts, or procedural compliance (Watson et al., 2016), which fails to capture the interpretive, political, and value-laden processes through which social value is defined and enacted.

To move past this limiting dichotomy, scholars have increasingly argued for hybrid research approaches, combining quantitative tools with qualitative methods that can interrogate the assumptions embedded in metric-driven definitions (Mulholland et al., 2019; Raiden et al., 2019). Recent scholarship has emphasised the plural, situated, relational, and negotiated nature embedded in institutional logics, governance frameworks, and power relations in social value (Raiden and King, 2023; Çıdık, 2023; Roy et al., 2025). While these contributions remain emergent, they indicate the potential for more reflective and generative conceptual work on the topic.

Scope and Aim of the Special Issue

Building on this conceptual foundation, the Special Issue seeks to consolidate and extend emerging theoretical work on social value in the built environment, with a particular emphasis on how social value is conceived and practised across multiple research and professional fields throughout the construction project lifecycle (i.e., social value ‘within’ and ‘through’ construction projects). It aims to generate contributions that deepen our conceptual understanding while also interrogating how social value is organised, governed, and practised in the built environment. We welcome papers that engage with the practices, processes, and stakeholders involved in creating, maintaining, managing, and owning the built environment.

We invite both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches that combine insights from multiple fields, such as construction management, urban studies, architecture, planning, geography, sociology, organisation studies, and political economy. Submissions may focus on projects, organisations, urban or regional systems, or policy frameworks, but should advance conceptual reflection and theoretical depth in understanding social value.

We particularly welcome contributions that address fundamental questions about what social value is, where and when it emerges, who creates it and to what ends, and how it can be studied. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Theorising social value as process and practice – analyses that go beyond outcome-focused definitions to explore how social value is produced, negotiated, and sustained across the lifecycle of construction projects, from planning and procurement to operation and legacy.
• Tracing connections between projects and places – research examining how project-based practices shape (and are shaped by) broader spatial, social, or ecological systems of value creation in the built environment.
• Revisiting stakeholder roles and responsibilities – studies that theorise how stakeholders—clients, designers, contractors, community actors, and intermediaries—interpret and enact social value within changing institutional and political contexts.
• Interrogating instruments and metrics – critical examinations of the frameworks, tools, and indicators used to define or measure social value, and the epistemological, ethical, or political assumptions they embed.
• Analyses of how social value interacts with core concerns of managing construction projects – such as project governance, procurement, stakeholder engagement, professional ethics, and value management.
• Comparative and cross-disciplinary perspectives – contributions that connect insights across fields to develop a richer and more integrated understanding of social value.

The Special Issue is open to all types of methodological approaches. Contributions may examine practices from any geographical region. We welcome papers based on empirical research building or revisiting theory, integrative or critical reviews, and reflective essays that advance the conceptualisation and theorisation of social value in the built environment.

Collectively, these contributions aim to stimulate dialogue between disciplines concerned with how value is understood, created, distributed, and sustained through the built environment, positioning construction projects as central to this wider scholarly conversation about value, justice, and social purpose.