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The study sets out to demonstrate how a lifecycle perspective on complex, public-sector procurement projects can be used for making qualitative assessments of procurement policy and practice and reveal those procurement capabilities that are most impactful for operating effectively.

Agency theory, institutional theory and the lifecycle analysis technique are combined to abductively develop a framework to identify, analyse and compare complex procurement policies and practices in public sector organisations. Defence is the focal case and is compared with cases in the Nuclear, Local Government and Health sectors.

The study provides a framework for undertaking a lifecycle analysis to understand the challenges and capabilities of complex, public-sector buyers. Eighteen hierarchically-arranged themes are identified and used in conjunction with agency theory and institutional theory to explain complex procurement policy and practice variation in some of the UK’s highest-profile public buyers. The study findings provide a classification of complex buyers and offer valuable guidance for practitioners and researchers navigating complex procurement contexts.

The lifecycle approach proposed is a new research tool providing a bespoke application of theory by considering each lifecycle phase as an individual but related element that is governed by unique institutional pressures and principal-agent relationships.

This paper aims to identify the values antecedents of women’s social entrepreneurship. It explores where and how these values emerge and how they underpin the perceived desirability and feasibility of social venture creation.

Values development across the life-course is interrogated through retrospective sense-making by thirty UK-based women social entrepreneurs.

The findings express values related to empathy, social justice and action-taking, developed, consolidated and challenged in a variety of experiential domains over time. The cumulative effects of these processes result in the perceived desirability and feasibility of social entrepreneurial venture creation as a means of effecting social change and achieving coherence between personal values and paid work, prompting social entrepreneurial action-taking.

This paper offers novel, contextualised insights into the role that personal values play as antecedents to social entrepreneurship. It contributes to the sparse literature focussed on both women’s experiences of social entrepreneurship generally, and on their personal values specifically.