Ashwin Mahalingam

External stakeholder support is critical to the success of megaprojects, necessitating strategic engagement, often using Information and Communications Technology (ICT). We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with a megaproject team and analysed their social media communications with the project community. The findings show three ICT practices used for managing external stakeholders: visualisation, simulation and social mediatisation. Taking a sociomateriality lens we demonstrate how these practices are used for diverse unintended uses to manage external stakeholders. Anchored in a dimensions of power framework, we discuss how these ICT practices were strategically used for persuading, framing and hegemonizing external stakeholders in megaprojects. Theoretically, we highlight the role of ICT for managing external stakeholders over the current use of improving the competitive advantage of internal stakeholders. Practically, social media is used to articulate practices in all the strategic roles, positioning it in a role as a critical ICT tool for external stakeholder management in infrastructure megaprojects.

This paper contributes to Rodney Turner's initiative to develop a theory of project management from practice. Organizational scholars studying strategy suggest that more attention needs to be paid to practices involved in organizing, as well as the institutional contexts in which these practices are embedded. Taking a cue from strategy-in-practice approaches, it is proposed that institutional theories can be used to address some questions that have not been answered adequately regarding megaprojects. Institutional theories also seem to be gaining the attention of scholars investigating large, global, infrastructure projects as reported in engineering, management and construction journals. Increasingly, it is evident that the problem areas attached to these projects stretch beyond technical issues: they must be considered as socio-technical endeavours embedded in complex institutional frames. The authors suggest that studying how to deal with institutional differences in the environment of megaprojects has both theoretical and practical implications.

This paper explores subtle strategies that megaproject teams develop in practice to manage stakeholders external to the project team. A governmentality approach is used to account for these strategies. A metro rail megaproject in India provides the case for the study. The strategies were identified through a content analysis of 640 project and non-project based Tweets posted by the metro rail organization. We augmented this dataset with the community's response through social media, as well as through semi-structured interviews that captured the project teams' responses. The findings indicate that the megaproject used various strategies: promoting the organization, giving progress updates, appealing to the community, as well as targeting of specific sections of the population. The effect of these attempts at governmentality through branding were observed in community discourses on social media platforms that echoed the strategic discourses projected by the megaproject while interviews enabled us to access the project team's responses. For the project community, the effects included a positive brand image, creating community brand advocates and building support for the project during contentious episodes. For the project team, the effects included job attraction, enhanced job perception as well as the creation of project team brand advocates. The relation between the governmentality instruments and their corresponding effects are theorized in six propositions.