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The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes and challenges, their relevance and the research opportunities the field presents.

The paper reviews prior literature and outlines the need to view public procurement as a policy tool to introduce the contributions to this special issue.

Public procurement has been consistently used to further public policies in a wide range of fields. The collection of articles in this special issue contributes to a broader understanding of the role and potential of public procurement in delivering desired policy outcomes in society. The articles show that public procurement largely has strategic aspirations, and its potential to deliver on wider societal issues is attractive to policy makers. The issues raised in this collection of articles, however, also demonstrate that public procurement often lacks strategic maturity and critical issues, notably around how to demonstrate and evaluate its impact and “success”.

This paper aims to stimulate interdisciplinary research into the role of public procurement as a policy tool and its ability to achieve public value.

This paper discusses theoretical and empirical findings that highlight the importance of public procurement for achieving public value. The special issue examines the interdisciplinary literature on public procurement and shows how it is being used to achieve public value.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how, and by whom, institutional logics are determined in the action of sustainable organisation. The authors analyse a supply chain network structure to understand how multiple stakeholders' perceptions of sustainability emerge into a dominant logic and diffuse across an organisational field.

Stakeholder network theory provides novel insights into emerging logics within a chocolate supply chain network. Semi-structured interviews with 35 decision-makers were analysed alongside 269 company documents to capture variations in emergent logics. The network was mapped to include 63 nodes and 366 edges to analyse power structure and mechanisms.

The socio-economic organising principles of sustainable organisation, their sources of power and their logics are identified. Economic and social logics are revealed, yet the dominance of economic logics creates risks to their coexistence. Logics are largely shaped in pre-competitive activities, and resource fitness to collaborative clusters limits access for non-commercial actors.

Powerful firms use network structures and collaborative and concurrent inter-organisational relationships to define and diffuse their conceptualisation of sustainability and restrict competing logics.

This novel study contributes to sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) through presenting the socio-economic logic as a new conceptual framework to understand the action of sustainable organisation. The identification of sophisticated mechanisms of power and hegemonic control in the network opens new research agendas.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether firms' transparency in supply chain (TISC) statements indicate that substantive action is being taken on modern slavery in UK government supply chains.

The authors analyse 66 of the UK government's strategic suppliers' TISC statements and 20 key documents related to the policy intent of the UK Parliament, 2015 TISC requirements. Qualitative document analysis identifies what suppliers say they are doing and what they are not saying to provide novel insights into how firms employ ambiguity to avoid timely action on modern slavery in their supply chains A set of propositions are developed.

The authors elaborate the concepts of time and change in socially sustainable supply chains and illustrate how firms use ambiguity in TISC statements as a highly strategic form of action to defend the status quo, reduce accountability and delay action for modern slavery within supply chains. The authors identify three ambiguous techniques: defensive reassurance, transfer responsibility and scope reduction that deviate from the policy intention of collaborative action.

The results illustrates how ambiguity is preventing firms from taking collaborative action to tackle modern slavery in their supply chains. The lack of action as a result of ambiguity protects firms, rather than potential victims of modern slavery.

Prior research focuses on technical compliance rather than the content of firms' TISC statements. This qualitative study provides novel insights into the policy-resistant effects of ambiguity and highlights the dynamic and instrumental role of modern slavery reporting. Theoretically, we identify accountability as an essential concept to address the causes of modern slavery in supply chains and for developing collaborative supply chain environments to tackle the issues.

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study investigates a variety of approaches to supply disruption risk management for achieving effective responses for resilience at the supply management subunit level (e.g. category of items). Drawing on the attention-based view of the firm, the authors model the attentional antecedents of supply resilience as (1) attentional perspectives and (2) attentional selection. Attentional perspectives focus on either supply risk sources or supply network recoverability, and both are hypothesised to have a direct positive association with supply resilience. Attentional selection is top down or bottom up when it comes to disruption detection, and these are hypothesised to moderate the association between disruption risk management perspectives and resilience.

Conducted at the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study employs a hierarchical regression analysis on a multicountry survey of 190 procurement professionals, each responding from the perspective of their own subunit area of supply responsibility.

Both attentional disruption risk management perspectives are needed to achieve supply resilience, and neither is superior in terms of achieving supply resilience. Both the efficiency of the top down and exposure to the unexpected with the bottom up are needed – to a balanced degree – for improved supply resilience.

The results encourage firms to purposefully develop their supply risk management practices, first, to include both perspectives and, second, to avoid biases in attentional selection for disruption detection. Ensuring a more balanced approach may allow firms to improve their supply resilience.

The results contribute to the understanding of the microfoundations that underpin firms' operational capabilities for supply risk and disruption management and possible attentional biases.

In the UK, major IT public procurement projects regularly fail at significant cost to the taxpayer. The prevalence of these failures presents scholars with a challenge; to both understand their genesis and to facilitate learning and prevention. Functional approaches have revealed numerous determinants of failure ranging from procurement specifications to risk escalation, but true and definitive causes remain elusive. However, since failure is not itself an absolute truth, but rather a concept which is reached when support is withdrawn, the survival of a project depends on there being sufficient belief in its legitimacy. We use critical hermeneutic methods and the conceptual lens of legitimacy to reveal powerful legitimating influences that enable and constrain action, but which are not analysed in the retrospective government inquiries that determine lessons learned.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a field-level examination of the adoption of sustainable procurement in social housing. It explores the role of regulation and procurement consortia in sustainable procurement.

The study employs a case study of the UK social housing sector and uses an online survey (n=116) of UK Housing Associations. Factor analysis identifies three parsimonious dimensions of sustainable procurement. Attitudinal data are analysed to explore the field-level adoption of sustainable procurement and the role of consortia.

The results delineate sustainable procurement activities into three factors; direction setting, supplier-centric assurance and local socially oriented supply. High yet sup-optimal levels of sustainable procurement activity are revealed. Prevailing attitudes identify positive commitments to sustainable procurement at individual, organisational and sector levels. The value of network collaboration is identified. Tenants as critical stakeholders do not prioritise sustainable procurement creating challenge for inclusivity. Regulators are seen to a have low level of sustainable procurement knowledge and procurement consortia a high perceived knowledge.

Results provide insight into the effect of sustainable procurement policy, the role of regulators and network structures and consortia, raising issues around legitimacy, coopetition, stakeholder engagement, performance measurement, and functional/sectoral maturity.

The identification of the potential exclusion of tenants in sustainability debates is particularly significant to deliver social value.

The relative newness of the social housing sector and its quasi-public sector status provides an original contribution to the consortia and sustainable procurement literatures.

This paper aims to present the results of a study of supply chain management (SCM) practice in small‐ to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in Merseyside, UK.

A questionnaire is used to identify the perceived benefits, barriers and attitudes towards SCM. The questionnaire was distributed to 250 SMEs in the Merseyside area. A total of 60 usable replies were received.

The results reveal the perceived benefits of SCM to SMEs, which centre on SCM as a means to improve customer responsiveness. It also reveals concerns over SMEs' ability to adapt to these new working relationships and therefore gain the desired benefits. Analysis of these barriers highlights that they reside at the individual, relational and organisational level, thus increasing the complexity of adapting to SCM.

Given the focus of the paper, this only looked at SMEs in the Merseyside area.

The paper provides thoughts on how SMEs can improve SCM within their own organisations and supply chains. This includes the adoption of a multi‐faceted change management approach to facilitate the adoption of SCM. This needs to cover the individual, relational and organisational levels.

Much of the SCM literature is dominated by case studies of large manufacturing organisations. The focus on the barriers and benefits to SMEs in a regional area is thus an identified gap in the extant literature.

The purpose of this paper is to adapt a social climate measure for use within a forensic intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) service and examine perceptions of social climate and the links with patient aggression across three levels of security.

Four staff participated in a focus group to discuss how the Essen Climate Evaluation Schema (EssenCES) could be adapted for IDD patients. Subsequently, a pilot study with three patients highlighted some difficulties in administering the adapted measure. Alterations in the administration of the measure were implemented with a further ten patients residing across three levels of security. The EssenCES was adapted to include more visual prompts to assist in the patients’ completion of the measure. The frequency of aggressive incidents in each of the three settings was also collated.

Statistical analysis revealed a non-significant trend where positive social climate ratings increased as the security level decreased. There was a significant difference in the frequency of aggressive incidents across the three levels of security; however, there were no significant relationships found between the questionnaire ratings and the frequency of incidents.

The results lacked statistical power due to the low number of participants. Further studies with adapted social climate measures need to be conducted to assess the implications of social climate on individuals with IDD in secure forensic services.

The study adapted and piloted a social climate measure for individuals in a forensic IDD service.

Attachment Theory can be regarded as central to the concept of relational security. There is a paucity of research examining the coherence of this construct for ward-based staff. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Five female nurses from the acute admission and assessment ward of a UK medium secure unit acted as participants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and inductive thematic analysis was applied.

Six themes; “staff-service user relationships”, “staff diversities”, “service user backgrounds”, “variability in service users’ presentations”, “service users with personality disorder are problematic” and “nurses do not use attachment” emerged from the data. The nurses used heuristic models of attachment-related behaviour and they lacked knowledge of constructs associated with Attachment Theory.

Acute admissions may not be representative of all treatment contexts. Traditional models of attachment style may have only limited relevance in forensic services.

Limited knowledge and confidence in the nurses regarding how Attachment Theory might apply to service users is interesting because it may limit the extent to which care, treatment and risk management might be informed by an understanding of service user representations of therapeutic relationships. Training and educational interventions for nurses that enhance understanding of personality development and attachment styles are warranted.

The importance of nurses for achieving relational security is emphasised and the adequacy of their training is questioned.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on 30 years of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), and contemplates the future. It makes a case for diversity, including a broad range of theories and research methodologies, as a defining feature of AAAJ. As we have done since 1988 in AAAJ’s first editorial, we continue to urge interdisciplinary accounting researchers to undertake innovative research and be both original and creative, avoiding the narrow focus and detachment from society that is characteristic of globally pervasive North American economics-based accounting research.

The paper employs an analysis and critique of trends in interdisciplinary research, drawing upon the previous 29 editorials/commentaries published in AAAJ. It also elucidates the field of scholarship associated with AAAJ in 2016 as evidence of the patterning of recent research and publishing trends.

This paper identifies challenges confronting interdisciplinary researchers in the globalised academic community. These include our obsession with theoretical engorgement and our adversarial rather than cooperative approach to knowledge development. Furthermore, the authors argue that researchers must reflect on their motivation, informing theories and values if they intend to contribute to practice, policy and a wider societal good. Accounting researchers have a responsibility to go beyond observation, engaging in and constructing a more equal and fair society.

This commentary reflects on developments in AAAJ and its community over three decades. The authors also address the wider AAAJ community, including the Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting (APIRA) conference attendees, AAAJ special issue editors, the editorial board, ad hoc reviewers, authors and supporters across AAAJ’s 30 years.