Stakeholder engagement in construction: Exploring corporate social responsibility, ethical behaviors, and practices

Stakeholder engagement is an undertheorized area of construction project management research. Often simplified as an act of corporate social responsibility, the complexity of the engagement concept means its processes and consequences evade closer scrutiny and analysis. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of stakeholder engagement to reveal its theoretical and practical complexity; two complimentary models of stakeholder engagement are mobilized to analyze empirical data from a hospital case-study project. The result is a retheorization of stakeholder engagement as a complex entwined process of responsibility, organizational action, and work package requirements where stakeholder engagement and agency (i.e., ethical treatment of stakeholders) are understood as separate variables that result in shifts among responsible, paternalistic, neoclassic, and strategic behaviors. The contribution lies in a more sophisticated understanding of stakeholder engagement being attained: shifts between stakeholder engagement and agency define relations between parties in corporate social responsibility (CSR) terms; the ethical aspirations of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) organizations are impacted by daily project activities; and the unique characteristics of stakeholder engagement in construction (e.g., binding of party interests, effect of subcontractor entry, and collective blame/praise) are brought into focus. Resulting recommendations include periodic review of engagement activity to ensure the CSR strategic objectives of organizations are aligned to stakeholder engagement work.