Stakeholders’ influence strategies on social responsibility implementation in construction projects

Abstract

Social responsibility implementation in construction projects relies on the active involvements by multiple internal and external stakeholders. Stakeholder influences are an important driving force for resolving or alleviating the social and environmental problems in construction activities. To provide a better understanding of the complex stakeholder inter-influence, this research adopted an inductive qualitative method to investigate distinct influence strategies used by project stakeholders in achieving social responsibility goals. The corpus of twenty-five in-depth semi-structured interviews with construction practitioners from the Australian and Hong Kong construction industries was analyzed by a text-mining software, Leximancer. The findings identified the influence strategies of eight stakeholder groups and revealed that all stakeholders used both cooperative and aggressive strategies to influence. In contrast with the statement that power can determine stakeholders' aggressiveness, this research found that the perceived legitimacy and urgency of the concerned issues are the main determinants for stakeholders’ aggressive strategies. The implications for project managers and policy makers are further discussed in the article.