Power and Strategies in the External Stakeholder Management of Megaprojects: A Circuitry Framework

Abstract

Infrastructure megaprojects can cause considerable inconvenience to external stakeholders such as project communities, stakeholders in lands and stakeholders in existing services. Managing these external stakeholders is difficult as they interact with the project across permeable boundaries, are unaccountable to the requirements of the project and cannot be governed with contractual instruments or conformance to standards, as is the case with internal stakeholders. Hence the project team must resort to other strategies to manage these stakeholders. There is at present little other than scattered accounts of the use of these strategies in the literature. What is missing is a framework to explain how such strategies work to manage external stakeholders. We use organizational power theories drawn from frameworks stressing both the dimensions and the circuits of power to understand how strategy and power interact in the process of managing external stakeholders. This research uses the case study of a metro rail project in India compiled from 30 semi-structured interviews, 168 news media articles along with their 446 user comments, and 640 social media tweets along with 435 community comments. Using a qualitative research methodology, we highlight relations of persuading, framing and hegemonizing strategies employed for managing the external stakeholders in the project. Covert power-based framing and hegemonizing strategies shape the visible overt power-based persuading strategies employed to manage external stakeholders.

Near-Field Communication (NFC) Technology Emergence: One or Several Technological Paths?

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“…Another source of power lies in actors abilities to control processes by managing participation in the decision-making arena and confining the agenda to safe questions (Hardy, 1996;Ninan et al, 2020). This tactic reduces the risk of opposition; however, its outcomes are more uncertain .…”

“…These outcomes result from the interplays between the different interests during the negotiations of the technological properties, which goes through phases of confrontation and resistance. While symbolic forms of influence are increasingly referred in the literature (Ninan et al, 2020), traditional tactics based on the mobilization of resources remain systematically implemented during the negotiations. The essence of resource mobilization lies in an asymmetry of resources between actors that creates a relation of dependence and thus allows imposing ones interests (Hardy, 1996).…”

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