Stakeholder Influence Pathways in Construction Projects: Multicase Study

Understanding external stakeholders' influence is essential to achieving success; however, little attention has been paid to investigating their indirect influence on projects. This study aims to explore indirect pathways that external stakeholders normally pursue to affect construction projects and to develop a framework of stakeholder-influencing pathways. The authors adopted abductive reasoning, using a preliminary framework. Based on the framework, four process-tracing case studies in the Vietnamese construction industry were conducted for data collection and analysis. Newspapers were the main source of data, complemented by interviews and other archive data, such as press releases, petitions, blog postings, and official documents. All cases confirmed the pathway through which stakeholders induce decision-makers to exert pressure related to a project. Also, some unanticipated results were found: first, two additional pathways, comprising two or three causally ordered mediators, can be employed to affect projects; second, stakeholders tend to use multiple influence pathways in which some actors, such as governmental authorities and the public, have a high rate of occurrence; and third, a mediator can be affected by more than one successor, whereas some mediators are capable of influencing various predecessors. Accordingly, the preliminary framework was revised to match the unanticipated results. This study explores a preliminary mechanism that transmits stakeholder influences to a project via multiple causally ordered actors. It is also the first comprehensive investigation into stakeholder influence pathways in the built environment. The findings can assist managers in stakeholder prioritization and anticipating their influences on projects.