Sustainability agencing: The involvement of stakeholder networks in megaprojects
Résumé
This article explores the involvement of stakeholders agencing sustainability in the context of megaprojects, which represent an extreme setting with inherent uncertainty and complexity. Through the concept of milieu, project marketing has for many years studied the diversity of actors, their heterogeneous nature and their multiple interactions, but without really tackling the issue of sustainability. As part of a three-year interaction with a rail supplier company, this research is based on three case studies of urban rail projects in France. Actor-network theory was applied as method theory. Findings suggest that agential configurations for sustainability include non-business actants, as well as hybrid and future collectives. We differentiate stakeholders according to the role they play in agencing sustainability: promoters, translators and targets. The study enriches the concept of milieu through a distinction between actors from the territory, milieu and project network. We propose the concept of sustainability agencing to offer (1) a dynamic view of stakeholders in project and industrial marketing and (2) a project-centered perspective of sustainability in business markets. Implications for theory and practice are given to foster future research in this area.