Stakeholder Engagement as a challenging Social Issue in Megaprojects Management

Megaprojects are highly embedded in social structures and have a strong impact on local communities involved. That is why this kind of projects offer a series of social research paths, concerning for example, the mechanism of social value creation, resilience strategies, or social responsibilities and stakeholder engagement practices. The paper focuses on these latter and aims to integrate the economic, organizational and managerial perspectives with the sociological one. Particular attention is devoted to the communication tools and to the paradigm of community of practice paradigm with their role of mediating between project managers and stakeholders. The managing-for-stakeholders approach is considered as an essential approach to complement the most traditional of management of stakeholders. Finally, this conceptual paper refers to both social network and stakeholder theories to integrate the current theoretical body of literature in the field of project management.