Project Stakeholder Management—Past and Present

Dealing with individuals or groups who may affect or be affected by the project processes, contents, or outcomes (i.e., the project stakeholders) has been acknowledged as a core task within project management for a long time. However, many problems related to stakeholder issues can be observed (see, e.g., Dalcher, 2009), and many projects are characterized by the fact that stakeholders’ expectations are not sufficiently considered or being met (Shenhar & Dvir, 2007) especially because dissimilar stakeholders may define project success factors differently (Davis, 2014).

Moreover, Killen, Jugdev, Drouin, and Petit (2012) claim that “most PM research … remain[s] largely ­atheoretical” (p. 526). Similarly, Koskela and Howell (2002) claim that there is no underlying theory of project management.

In this special issue of Project Management Journal® on Project Stakeholder Management, we aim to advance the understanding of this topic by looking into theory outside the project management field and by presenting findings from case studies. In this overview article, we identify the theoretical roots of the stakeholder concept and the current state of the field. We point to early proponents of stakeholder management or stakeholder thinking, some of whom did not use the term “stakeholder.” In addition, we point to recent concepts and developments in understanding outside the project management field that are relevant in the project management context, not the least of which is project stakeholder analysis. Then, we introduce the five articles included in the special issue. Last, we identify other interesting publications on the topic of project stakeholder management.

Views of a Firm

The origins of project stakeholder management are not found in the project management field itself, rather they stem from theories of strategic management. R. Edward Freeman, who was a professor at the University of Minnesota in the 1980s, published the book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach in 1984 in which he encouraged a Stakeholder View of the Firm. This perspective was needed, he argued, to enhance another perspective of companies, which differed from the dominant views, in other words, The Production View of the Firm and The Managerial View of the Firm (Freeman, 1984).

Before the 19th century, companies typically were small, owner–­entrepreneur founded entities, and business success depended primarily on the firm's ability to satisfy suppliers and customers. As the owner and the family members were often the only workers and the organizational entity was small, the managerial focus in this context was to procure resources from suppliers, turn the resources into products, and sell the products to customers, referred to by Freeman (1984) as The Production View of the Firm.

With the Industrial Revolution's development of new production processes, adoption of technology, rapid urbanization, and significant investments in production facilities and infrastructure, companies grew bigger and could no longer be run only by the founder and the family members themselves. In a context of hired managers and nonfamily workers, the managerial task grew to include issues concerning owners as well as employees, encouraging a new strategic perspective. Thus, owners and others began to apply A Managerial View of the Firm rather than The Production View of the Firm (Freeman, 1984).

Democratic developments in mature or postindustrial societies gave voices to more individuals and groups, for example, governmental authorities, unions, consumer advocates, competitors, environmentalists, special interest groups, and the media. Thus, Freeman (1984) argued that a Managerial View of the Firm was no longer sufficient for business success; rather, managers and directors should apply a Stakeholder View of the Firm and consider “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm's objectives” (Freeman, 1984, p. 25). Without understanding the needs and concerns of such stakeholder groups, the firm cannot formulate corporate objectives that would make the stakeholders support the firm sufficiently for its present and future survival. At the same time, stakeholders that are affected by the firm's strategies have a legitimate right to have their interests considered by the firm (Freeman, 1984).

Early Stakeholder Definitions

Even though many acknowledge Freeman as the founder of stakeholder management theory, he gives credit to a number of other researchers. He initially traced the stakeholder concept back to 1963, when researchers in an internal memorandum at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) defined stakeholders as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist” (SRI cited in Freeman, 1984, p. 31).

Recent research, however, by Robert Strand at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, along with Freeman, shows that the original inspiration for stakeholder management theory and the conceptual construct “stakeholder” is probably Scandinavian (Strand & Freeman, 2015). A Swedish researcher, Eric Rhenman, explicitly used the stakeholder term in his book Industrial Democracy in 1968. He pointed to the mutual dependencies between the company and individuals and groups like employees, owners, customers, suppliers, and creditors (i.e., stakeholders). These stakeholders were dependent on the company to be able to realize their personal goals, whereas the company was dependent on the stakeholders to realize the company's objectives (Rhenman, 1968).

As Rhenman was a visiting scholar at Stanford in 1968, Freeman's initial sources, the people associated with SRI in the 1960s, thought that Rhenman developed stakeholder thinking at Stanford (Freeman, 1984). However, new research (Strand & Freeman, 2015) shows that Rhenman's book was a translation of one of his Swedish books, Företagsdemokrati och företagsorganisation [Industrial Democracy and Industrial Management], published in 1964. One of his other books, Företagsledning i en föränderlig Värld [Corporate Management in a Changing World] (Rhenman & Stymne, 1965) was also published before he visited Stanford. Strand and Freeman (2015) provide evidence that both the Swedish and the English versions of the books’ manuscripts were finished before Rhenman had his extended stay at Stanford. Indeed, the forewords were signed “Stockholm, January 1964” for the Swedish version and “Stockholm, September 1967” for the English version. In fact, Rhenman was working on other manuscripts while staying at Stanford (Strand & Freeman, 2015); thus, Rhenman must have been occupied with the stakeholder concept before he met the SRI researchers.

In his 1964 book, Rhenman used the word “interessent,” which can be translated to “a person (or group) who has an interest.” Mrs. Nancy Adler translated the book into English, according to the foreword by Rhenman (Strand & Freeman, 2015), so she may have proposed the word “stakeholder” in her translation. However, Strand and Freeman (2015) argue that Rhenman had clear competencies in English: Rhenman had been at the Carnegie Institute of Technology between 1959 and 1960 and at the University of Cambridge in 1962. Thus, Strand and Freeman find it very likely that he had a leading role in editing the English version himself and may have constructed the English term. Although we do not know precisely how the term came to life as a theoretical construct, we do know that management thinkers in many countries now acknowledge that managers in both private and public organizations should consider various parties with whom mutual dependencies exist.

Early Proponents, Also Within Project Management

In his book, Freeman (1984) pointed to early traces of the stakeholder concept within the streams of literature on corporate planning, systems theory, corporate social responsibility, and organization theory (even though not all of the researchers used the concept directly, e.g., Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978, as described later in this section). We can add that based on the fact that codetermination laws in Germany were introduced for heavy industries such as steel and coal in the early 1950s and applied to all industries in the 1970s, it seems very likely that the understanding of stakeholder management was already widespread in industrial countries. Moreover, in democratic countries, thinkers within sociology and political economy were concerned with stakeholder-related issues, for example, participatory decision making in large firms. These concerns arose to protect people who were employed in risky manufacturing, mining, and other industries, with the understanding that at least the risks should be considered and proactively minimized.

William R. King and David I. Cleland, two researchers who have had an enormous influence on project management, worked during the 1970s in the field of corporate planning. However, both had experience in project management. William R. King had worked as a pilot and officer in the U.S. Air Force and earned a PhD in operations research in 1964. His doctoral supervisor, Russell L. Ackoff, was another important contributor to stakeholder theory. In 1967, King joined the University of Pittsburgh's Katz Graduate School of Business to pursue an academic career. David I. Cleland also joined the University of Pittsburgh (Swanson School of Engineering) in 1967. He had worked as project manager in the design, development, and manufacturing of weapon systems in the U.S. Air Force.

In their 1978 book, Strategic Planning and Policy, King and Cleland articulate a method based on their work on project management for analyzing “ ‘clientele groups,’ ‘claimants,’ or ‘stakeholders’ of the organization” (p. 149). In turn, King and Cleland (1978) point to Churchman (1968) and McConnell (1971) as examples of managerial thinkers who have suggested that the organizational clientele should be the basic foundation for setting business objectives and strategies. Further, King and Cleland (1978) explicitly state that a firm has responsibilities and moral obligations to a number of claimants, including stockholders, managers, employees, suppliers, distributors, and supporting service organizations such as advertising agencies, various interest groups, public agencies, and the public at large.

During the same year King and Cleland's book was published, the American researchers Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald R. Salancik (1978) published The External Control of Organizations: A Resource Dependence Perspective. In line with the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) definition of stakeholders as “those groups without whose support the organization would cease to exist” (Freeman, 1984, p. 31), Pfeffer and Salancik were concerned with external constraints affecting organizations due to dependency. Their aim was to contribute to the theoretical framework by offering ways for designing and managing the organizations in order to mitigate such constraints. Further, they aimed to explain how external resources affect executives’ behavior due to any organization's need for procurement of resources (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). It can be inferred, in terms of stakeholder theory, that Pfeffer and Salancik (1978) focused on the fact that stakeholders possessed resources and not (as was the case for King & Cleland, 1978) that the company had moral obligations to fulfill with various stakeholder groups.

A Matter of Stakeholder Participation

William R. King's supervisor, Russell Ackoff, is well known for his work in corporate planning (see, e.g., Ackoff, 1970). However, Ackoff was also an ­important contributor to stakeholder theory. Draw­ing on systems theory, Ackoff suggested that stakeholders should be seen as elements of a system. Based on this insight, he offered a method for doing stakeholder analyses of organizational systems. Furthermore, he argued that solving system-wide problems required the participation of stakeholders. He proposed a method for including stakeholder groups when analyzing and solving problems and illustrated it with case studies on designing large-scale projects (Ackoff, 1974).

Recent Publications and Concepts

Leaving the first movers within stakeholder thinking behind and jumping to the present, Freeman still stands as one of the leading researchers within the field. He has produced an impressive number of journal articles, books, and other publications. Examples of recent journal articles are Strand and Freeman's (2015) “Scandinavian Cooperative Advantage: The Theory and Practice of Stakeholder Engagement in Scandinavia” in Journal of Business Ethics, and Haskins and Freeman's (2015) “What Managers Should Never Want to Hear: Silence” in Management Decision. Examples of books are Managing for Stakeholders (Freeman, Harrison, & Wicks, 2007) and Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art (Freeman, Harrison, Wicks, Parmar, & de Colle, 2010).

Another very interesting piece of work is the book Understanding Stakeholder Thinking (Näsi, 1995) based on an international symposium on stakeholder thinking organized in Finland. Juha Näsi, then a professor at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (who unfortunately has since passed away), helped organize the conference and edited the book. Näsi contributed two chapters, the introductory chapter, “What is Stakeholder Thinking? A Snapshot of a Social Theory of the Firm,” and a chapter entitled “A Scandinavian Approach to Stakeholder Thinking: An Analysis of its Theoretical and Practical Uses, 1964–1980,” which are reprinted in the Journal of Business Ethics (see Strand, 2015). In addition, just before he died, Näsi organized a mini-conference of leading stakeholder thinkers in Tampere, Finland, with sponsorship through the University of Tampere, where he held a professorship. Many of the papers presented were subsequently published as a special issue on stakeholder thinking in the Journal of Business Ethics, −honoring Juha Näsi's work (see Freeman, Näsi, & Savage, 2010).

As previously discussed, Freeman and his coauthors differentiate between an instrumental approach, Managing Stakeholders or Management of Stakeholders, and a normative or ethical Man­aging for Stakeholders approach (Freeman et al., 2007, 2010). Whereas the former is concerned with stakeholder resource procurement, the latter suggests that all stakeholders have the right and legitimacy to receive attention from the organization (see also Julian, Ofori-Dankwa, & Justis, 2008). Stakeholders should not be seen only as a means to specific aims in the organization but also as valuable in themselves (Donaldson & Preston, 1995). In other words: “Stakeholders are persons or groups with legitimate interests in procedural and/or substantive aspects of corporate activity. Stakeholders are identified by their interests in the corporation, whether the corporation has any corresponding functional interest in them” (Donaldson & Preston, 1995, p. 67, emphases in original). This means that an analysis of the stakeholders’ potentials for supporting or threatening the organization, as proposed by Freeman (1984) and Savage, Nix, Whithead, and Blair (1991), should not alone form the basis of how they are treated. Instead, all stakeholders should be embraced by the organization and win–win situations should be sought.

However, it seems clear that this normative statement has to be qualified so as not to be too naive: organizations, and especially projects as temporary organizations, face many stakeholders with interests that conflict with the interests of other stakeholders. Moreover, organizations have legitimate interests of their own that they must fulfill in order to survive. Thus, the normative statement that organizations should search for win–win solutions, given the ability to find one—in due time, and with an appropriate effort—is very challenging, particularly for projects that are temporary endeavors. On the other hand, many projects have long-term irreversible implications. This tension between limited project time and long-term consequences makes the stakeholder management of and for projects such an interesting and fundamental question.

Another interesting approach in current stakeholder literature is to look at interorganizational collaborations (i.e., project networks), and the nature of the stakeholder relationships in both temporary as well as more permanent networks. Such networks could, for example, involve projects across public and private sectors developing new products, processes, or technologies for the benefit of society (see, e.g., Savage et al., 2010).

Project Stakeholder Analysis

The project management literature recognizes that project stakeholders are important for project success for at least four reasons. First, the project needs contributions (financial and nonfinancial resources) from stakeholders; second, stakeholders often establish the criteria for assessing the success of the project; third, stakeholders’ (potential) resistance may cause various risks and negatively affect the success of the ­project; and fourth, the project may affect stakeholders in both negative and positive ways (see, e.g., Aarseth, Rolstadas, & Andersen, 2011; de Bakker, Boonstra, & Wortmann, 2011; McLeod, Doolin, & MacDonel, 2012; Morris & Hough, 1987; Sallinen, Ahola, & Ruuska, 2011; Turner & Zollin, 2012; Vrhovec, Hovelja, Vavpotič, & Krisper, 2015). The literature also identifies typical project stake­holders to include investors, −suppliers, customers, users, authorities, neighbors, media, and so forth (see, e.g., Turner & Zollin, 2012).

To procure resources for the project as well as to satisfy project stakeholders, stakeholder analysis plays an important role (Eskerod & Jepsen, 2013). The aim of doing project stakeholder analysis is to increase the project team's ­possibility to “anticipate opportunities and problems for the project at a time when the project team still has time and opportunity for manoeuvring” (Jepsen & Eskerod, 2009, p. 336). Doing stakeholder analysis serves two purposes: (1) to help the project representatives accomplish the project by identifying ways to procure the necessary financial and nonfinancial resources, including avoiding counter actions, and (2) to help the project representatives understand the interests and concerns of the project stakeholders.

Each of the two purposes relates both to an instrumental approach of stakeholder management, or a Management of Stakeholders approach so stakeholders do what is needed for project success, and a normative or ethical approach, in other words, a Management for Stakeholders approach in which the project does what is needed for the stakeholders (Eskerod & Huemann, 2013, 2014b; Freeman et al., 2007, 2010). The first purpose (resource procurement) concerns how the project representatives find ways to make the stakeholders willing as well as able to contribute the needed resources (an instrumental approach) in order to achieve the benefits they strive for to fulfill their needs (an ethical approach). The second approach (procurement of knowledge about the stakeholders’ needs and concerns) concerns how the project representatives find ways for the project to satisfy the needs of the stakeholders (ethical approach), while at the same time figuring out how to enhance project success in the form of stakeholder satisfaction (instrumental approach).

Based on the above argumentation, we claim that project stakeholder analysis increases the possibilities of combining the “of” and “for” approaches and thereby the likelihood for both project management success (i.e., finishing the project on time, within budget, on specification, and to stakeholder satisfaction) and project product success (i.e., fulfilling the purposes of the project and harvesting stipulated benefits for the investor and other stakeholders) (Andersen, 2008). In other words, stakeholder analysis helps the project manager and the project team to see, in proper time, the project through more lenses—the project's lenses and the stakeholders’ lenses—and to seek win–win solutions rather than trade-offs.

To obtain this it is, however, necessary that the applied project stakeholder analysis methods are appropriate, and neither too complex (so that they are difficult to apply or the data produced too overwhelming to make use of) nor too superficial (so that the data produced are not relevant or sufficient). Unfortunately, many authors within the project management literature claim that the current methods for project stakeholder analysis are of limited value. For example, Jepsen and Eskerod (2009) state that “the current guidelines for project stakeholder management should be considered as a conceptual framework rather than instructions on how to do a real world stakeholder analysis” (p. 335). Eskerod and Huemann (2013) have analyzed the international standards and bodies of knowledge, for example, A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), the International Competence Baseline (ICB), and PRINCE2, and argue that today's working forms of stakeholder management have a number of limits. The core argumentation is that the current working forms are not suited for grasping the increased complexity facing project managers and project teams.

Classical project stakeholder analysis methods typically consist of a number of steps, involving stakeholder identification and various stakeholder assessments, for example, determination of needed contributions from each stakeholder as well as each stakeholder's requirements, wishes, and concerns in relation to the project (see, e.g., Eskerod & Huemann, 2014a; Karlsen, 2002; Littau, Jujagiri, & Adlbrecht, 2010; Yang, Shen, Bourne, Ho, & Xue, 2011). Based on those assessments, strategies are chosen on how to interact with each stakeholder.

As conflicting interests may exist between the project team and various stakeholders or across one or more of the stakeholders, prioritization is often an important part of the strategy planning (Jepsen & Eskerod, 2009). Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (1997) suggest categorizing the identified stakeholders based on an assessment of three attributes concerning each given issue (i.e., the issues that lead to a need for prioritization): power, legitimacy, and urgency. For example, a powerful and legitimate stakeholder with an urgent interest should be offered more management attention than a stakeholder without the three attributes. Prioritization of stakeholders is also part of the classical work by Freeman (1984) because he differentiates between primary and secondary stakeholders in order to allocate limited management resources properly. The primary stakeholders are the ones who are essential to the organization's well-being and survival, whereas the others are secondary stakeholders.

Another characteristic within project stakeholder analysis is that it is issue driven, meaning that the focus in the analysis is on a certain challenge at a specific point in time. This approach makes it possible to reduce the analytical complexity and stay focused, rather than trying to incorporate all details, issues, and project phases in one picture. To try to construct one picture only is a common mistake among inexperienced or untrained project managers, building on the underlying, wrong assumption that the stakeholders and their interests and attributes (e.g., power and legitimacy) are stable across a long time span and various issues. This issue-­specificity relates back to Freeman (1984), Savage et al. (1991), and Eskerod and Jepsen (2013) who all point to the necessity of an issue-driven analysis.

Even though exceptions exist (e.g., Ackermann & Eden, 2011; Savage et al., 2010), it is characteristic for the project management literature that the relationships between the project and the stakeholders are seen as dyadic relationships, meaning that they should be between the project and each stakeholder, placing the project in the middle. More authors (e.g., Eskerod & Jepsen, 2013) have pointed to the weakness of this project-centric approach due to the fact that it does not acknowledge that (1) the project may not be the center of attention for the stakeholders as they have their own set of stakeholders to relate to (and some of them may even be more important); (2) the project stakeholders may relate to each other and even be more influenced by some of the other stakeholders than the project team; and (3) the project stakeholders may form coalitions and be much more powerful than a dyadic analysis can detect. Therefore, we claim, project stakeholder analysis methods will benefit from a network approach rather than a dyadic approach. This is in line with Ackoff's (1974) classical work in which he suggests “stakeholders in a system” as the proper unit of analysis.

In addition, project stakeholder analysis is an environmental interpretation process (Aaltonen, 2011) in which the project representatives have the obligation not to perceive the stakeholder as “unreasonable” or “irrational” but instead realize that the current understanding of the particular stakeholder is not adequate or sufficient (Freeman, 1984). A better analysis result will typically be obtained if a given stakeholder category, such as the government and employees, is broken down into smaller categories for the analysis, maybe even at the individual level instead of an aggregated level (Ackermann & Eden, 2011; Eskerod & Jepsen, 2013; Freeman, 1984).

Other interesting contributions related to stakeholder analysis are Heravi, Coffey, and Trigunarsyah (2015) who discuss how to evaluate the level of stakeholder involvement during the project planning processes of building projects, and Walker and Maqsood (2014) who propose that stakeholder voices can be heard through the construction of “rich pictures.”

Articles in This Special Issue

All articles in this special issue draw on some of the theoretical concepts presented in this overview article, and they are all built on in-depth case studies. They all address aspects of having to deal with many different project stakeholders, which is a ­typical situation in contemporary project management.

The article “Stakeholder Dynamics During the Project Front-End: The Case of Nuclear Waste Repository Projects” by Aaltonen, Kujala, Havela, and Savage aims to increase the understanding of stakeholder challenges in large and complex projects, especially during the front-end phase. The authors have studied and compared stakeholder dynamics of two pioneering nuclear waste repository projects, one in Finland and one in the United States. Even though stakeholder dynamics is acknowledged in the project management literature (see, e.g., Eskerod & Vaagaasar, 2014), the elements of the dynamics have not been conceptualized in a detailed, systematic manner. In this article, the authors propose a new conceptual framework—a stakeholder salience-position matrix—which makes it possible to analyze changes in stakeholders’ importance and position toward a project. The matrix is applied to the two nuclear waste repository projects, and hereby it explicates how stakeholder dynamics are influenced by the interaction of stakeholders’ influence behavior, stakeholder management activities, and the project's contextual conditions.

The article “Stakeholder Inclusiveness: Enriching Project Management with General Stakeholder Theory” by Eskerod, Huemann, and Ringhofer aims to increase the understanding of project stakeholder management by discussing dilemmas related to stakeholder inclusiveness, in other words, to engage a broad range of stakeholders during the project course. The authors have undertaken a ­longitudinal case study of a public strategy development project in Denmark. Based on the findings, three propositions are offered: Applying stakeholder inclusiveness in a project (1) increases the likelihood of more engaged and satisfied stakeholders, (2) increases a danger of losing focus on those of the stakeholders who possess the most critical resources for the project's survival and progress, and (3) increases a danger of inducing stakeholder disappointment due to expectation escalation and impossibility of embracing conflicting requirements and wishes.

The article “Breakthrough R&D Stake­holders: The Challenges of Legitimacy in Highly Uncertain Projects” by Hooge and Dalmasso aims to increase the understanding of internal stakeholders in a specific kind of projects, that is, highly uncertain breakthrough R&D projects. The authors have studied the management of internal R&D stakeholders and their involvement dynamics in breakthrough R&D projects in France. Building on a longitudinal research partnership with a global car manufacturer since 2005, the research highlights the important dynamics of involvement among internal R&D stakeholders in the engineering development organization. Some stakeholders, acting as experts, innovation design strategists, or internal collaboration strategists, succeed in involving the individuals needed for the project's progress, sometimes generating an over-commitment. The success of the rationales of these stakeholders on engineering resources involvement depended on the perceived legitimacy of their holders.

The article “Managing Project Stakeholder Communication: The Qstock Festival Case” by Turkulainen, Aaltonen, and Lohikoski aims to increase the understanding on how to manage communication with the stakeholders throughout a project course. The three authors present findings from a case study of a Finnish music festival in which they have examined how the ­communication was facilitated and managed across different stakeholders during the different phases of the project life cycle. By building on an information processing view and the stakeholder salience framework, the study shows how stakeholder communication practices varied from impersonal to personal and group modes and depended on stakeholders’ salience and the phase of the project life cycle. The findings imply that understanding stakeholder management requires a dynamic approach; in others words, different communication practices are required over the project life cycle due to varying degrees of salience of the stakeholders.

The last article in this special issue, “Online Stakeholder Interactions in the Early Stage of a Megaproject” by Williams, Ferdinand, and Pasian, aims to increase the understanding of stakeholder social media interactions in the planning stage of large and complex projects. The characteristics for such projects are that, typically, they are embedded in a network of stakeholder relationships that range from small, local community groups to national and international bodies that may support or oppose the project. The authors have studied a public infrastructure megaproject (called High Speed Rail) in the United Kingdom. Twitter conversations for one year were analyzed using Social Network Analysis and inductive analyses of Twitter profiles and content were undertaken. The purpose was to examine the overall evolution, configuration, and composition of the stakeholder network, which emerged from the project. The analyses indicate that the majority of online stakeholders opposed the project and formed stable clusters within an overall network that had increased in stability over the period of study. The authors contribute to the understanding of stakeholder analysis as well as of mega projects. They demonstrate that social network analysis as a methodology is a useful complement to ­existing stakeholder analysis methods and that it may provide real-time insights into the complex evolving discussions around megaprojects seen in the project management field.

More Research Literature on Project Stakeholder Management

In the previous text, we looked for clues within strategic management to understand the issues relevant to project management, which was also done by Drouin and Jugdev (2013). However, a number of contributions within the project management field itself addressing project stakeholder management have also been identified. Recent examples of reviewed articles are Littau, Jujagiri, and Adlbrecht (2010) and Mok, Shen, and Yang (2015). Recent examples of articles that draw on process analyses that are quite rare are Beringer, Jonas, and Gemünden (2012); Jepsen (2013); Eskerod and Vaagaasar (2014); and Yang, Wang, and Jin (2014). Even doctoral theses on project stakeholder management can be identified, for example, Bourne (2003) (referred in Walker, 2014) and Aaltonen (2010), as well as these scholars’ subsequent publications, for example, Bourne (2009), Aaltonen and Kujala (2010), and Aaltonen (2011). Other articles deal with leadership responsibility and ethical dilemmas (e.g., Doh & Quigley, 2014; Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2014), yet other articles suggest that we should look into the “stakeholder relational ontology” (Missonier & Loufrani-Fedida, 2014) or apply a socio-dynamic approach to stakeholder management (Walley, 2013).