The management of construction projects (MoCP), concerned with processes of setting-up, developing and delivering projects, has remained largely restricted to ensuring project efficiency by addressing the triple constraints comprising time, cost and scope. However, increasing societal awareness about the adverse impacts of construction projects on the natural environment and some sections of society has led to pressure on organizations to expand the scope of project related managerial decision-making from addressing the triple constraints to addressing the triple bottom line of sustainability, viz., the social, environmental and economic dimensions. Among these three dimensions, the social dimension has remained the least understood and investigated in context of the MoCP. More importantly, literature has paid little attention to the actions of client organizations, the main initiators and drivers of social sustainability initiatives, during the front-end phase when key decisions on project selection and prioritization are made. To bridge this knowledge gap, this study investigates the integration of social sustainability considerations in MoCP with a focus on client organizations and projects’ front-end.
A multi-phase research design consisting of three sequential phases –exploratory, descriptive and explanatory – has been used here. The exploratory phase addresses ‘how’ social sustainability considerations could be integrated with MoCP and involves development of a conceptual framework, motivated by the stakeholder theory, to operationalize socially sustainable MoCP. The framework consists of four stakeholder-centric constructs of social sustainability considerations and six potential areas of integration of social sustainability considerations in the MoCP (areas of ISS-MoCP). In the descriptive phase, the framework is used for conducting empirical investigations through content analysis of publicly available project data for ascertaining the extent to which social sustainability considerations are actually integrated in three selected areas of ISS-MoCP pertaining to client organizations and project front-end. The final, explanatory phase builds on the results of the descriptive phase by elucidating from social sustainability perspective how public clients prioritize interests of a few stakeholders during the front-end. For this purpose, semi-structured interviews were conducted with senior officials from public organizations and their responses were thematically analyzed on the basis of stakeholder salience attributes from the theory of stakeholder salience.
Collectively, the results of this study: a) provide a theoretically grounded starting point to guide organizations in the construction industry to orient their MoCP towards social sustainability, beginning with the project front-end, b) present a cogent narrative, underpinned by the theory of stakeholder salience, regarding which stakeholders’ interest are given more attention by clients in social sustainability-centric initiatives during front-end and why. Unlike existing studies, which have mostly considered individual stakeholders in isolation, the narrative developed here considers multiple stakeholders simultaneously from a clients’ perspective and ascertains their relative salience based on the attributes of power, legitimacy, and urgency, and c) reveal multiple areas of improvement in the current practices of MoCP from a social sustainability perspective, and also identify specific stakeholders for whom such improvements could be made.