Towards a Framework for Community Stakeholder Engagement with Infrastructure Projects Through Social Media

Abstract

In infrastructure projects, systematic engagement with the perspectives and positions of community stakeholders is usually challenging. In this study, social media is introduced as a platform for observing and gathering the voices and attitudes of community stakeholders. Based on traditional stakeholder engagement theory, this research employs naturalistic inquiry to collect data on the organic interactions between stakeholders and projects on social media. It analyses and summarises stakeholder engagement patterns on social media, introducing a novel framework of stakeholder sentiment and emotion analysis. This theoretical framework includes a new social media dialogue model. It employs two main analytical tools: categorical grouping of online community stakeholders and a stakeholder emotion matrix based on social media data. The model also categorises the online response strategies for projects based on the output of these tools. This study supplements current stakeholder engagement theory by providing a framework to guide online stakeholder engagement. The theoretical framework outlines the general environment for online stakeholder engagement, offers essential elements and steps for project stakeholder dialogues, and provides appropriate theories and methods for different dialogue stages and steps. It offers new perspectives and theories for future research on online stakeholder engagement. The novel social media stakeholder framework proposed in this study can be applied to project stakeholder engagement practices, providing new analytical tools and response strategies for studying community stakeholder engagement via social media, which will enable practitioners to use social media to carry out community stakeholder engagement for projects more efficiently.