Track: Project Management

Abstract

Local community is the forgotten legitimate stakeholder of megaprojects which can influence the project organization’s activities by its support or opposition. However, megaprojects have always been recognized as being unpopular leaving project organizations with the community’s dissatisfaction. Understanding the local community’s evaluation of the project organization activities would lead organizations to better satisfying them as well as gaining their support and being recognized as legitimate. This research adopts an exploratory case study method to reveal organizations which try to get utmost compatibility with societal norms and values are known as better legitimate compared to those aggressively change the societal values. Additionally it suggests that while a community has a history with an organization over time it considers a stereotype for the organization and limits the further analysis of new information for finding causality of organization’s activities. Therefore, organizations which aim as changing their approach should involve local community to actively observe and analyze organization recent behavior to develop a new stereotype for the organization.