Managing Project Community in Infrastructure Megaprojects

Developing countries, such as India, look towards massive investments in infrastructure megaprojects to achieve their development goals quickly. However, megaprojects are plagued with failures and inefficiencies often due to the project’s inability to handle external stakeholders such as project community. Project communities are the end users of the project, are most inconvenienced by the project, and they hold significant potential to stop the project by asking a democratically elected government to do so. In this context, we seek to understand how a metro rail megaproject in India manages their project community through visible and invisible strategies using an in-depth case study. The organizational power theories of the dimensions of power theory and the circuit of power theory are used to explain these strategies. The research draws on data from 30 semi-structured interviews with the project team and five years of social media data comprising 640 Tweets. A Grounded theory method is used to find the visible, invisible strategies and their relation between each other. The results show that invisible strategies depend on visible strategies by relying on the adaptations made for the community and the visible strategies depend on the invisible strategies by relying on the changed preferences of the project community. The findings have contributions to theory and practice of managing project community in infrastructure megaprojects.