International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

International Journal of Project Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman

Mapping the knowledge domain of stakeholder perspective studies in
construction projects: A bibliometric approach
Jin Xue a, Geoffrey Qiping Shen a,∗, Rebecca Jing Yang b, Hengqin Wu a,c, Xiao Li a, Xue Lin d,
Fan Xue e
a

Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong
School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University, Australia
c
School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, China
d
School of Government, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China
e
Department of Real Estate and Construction, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
b

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Keywords:
Stakeholder
Knowledge map
Bibliometrics
Construction projects

Construction projects require the effective collaboration among the various types of stakeholders involved to
succeed, thus leading to stakeholder perspective studies in construction projects. The study proposes an integrated bibliometric approach to detect the knowledge evolution, domain and frontier with a broader searching
scope compared with manual review. A total of 752 peer-reviewed academic papers published until the end of
2017 are used. The knowledge evolution indicates seven milestones in history, namely, stakeholder concept,
method, identification, assessment, management, influence and complexity. The identified knowledge domain
consists of four major research areas which are society, sustainability, analytical tool and project management.
The knowledge frontier is also revealed, including a dearth of detailed discussions on stakeholder engagement in
sustainable urban projects, lack of generalisation of stakeholder studies in complex construction projects, limited
application of dynamic and simulation stakeholder analysis in uncertain project environment and few instant and
accurate approaches to integrate stakeholder information. The study provides a holistic knowledge map for the
past, current and future of stakeholder perspective studies in construction projects.

1. Introduction

Shen, Brandon & Baldwin, 2009). Moreover, construction projects
are on the way to achieve sustainability, which is critically driven
by support from project stakeholders (Gan, Zuo, Ye, Skitmore &
Xiong, 2015). According to previous studies, project stakeholders
are the direct participants and affected people of the construction
projects (Guide, 2001). Their interactions and relationships directly
affect project completion (Liu et al., 2015). In recent years, safety
accidents and community protests have occurred frequently during
the implementation of construction projects, resulting in cost overruns and time delays (Zhao, Mccoy, Kleiner, Mills & Lingard, 2016;
Zhou, Hou, Yang, Chong & Moon, 2019). The reason, apart from
the technical issues within the project team, is highly related to the
poor management of project stakeholders (Liu et al., 2015; Olander
& Landin, 2005). Therefore, several stakeholder perspective studies
in construction projects (SPCP) have been conducted with the aim
to improve project performance. As a result, some theories, frameworks and models have been established in this multi-disciplinary
field which have focused on different themes, such as infrastructure,

The stakeholder concept is important in strategic management
and is considered an essence of project management (Freeman, 1984;
Institute, 1987). With the fast development of the construction industry,
a growing number of complex projects are underway all over the world,
and they have far-reaching effects on national and regional economic
development (Mok, Shen & Yang, 2015). A construction project is complex as it comprises various processes and participants (Yang, Shen &
Ho, 2009b). It involves a wide range of stakeholders who have different
cultural and occupational backgrounds (Mok et al., 2015). Given the
temporary nature of stakeholder relationship in construction projects,
dealing with complexities is challenging for project stakeholders owing
to the of experience (Yang et al., 2009b). Construction projects are also
full of uncertainties due to their long-term duration (De Meyer, Loch
& Pich, 2002). Stakeholder collaboration is required to react instantly
when uncertain events happen (Read, Madani, Mokhtari & Hanks, 2017;

∗

Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jin.xue@connect.polyu.hk (J. Xue), bsqpshen@polyu.edu.hk (G.Q. Shen), rebecca.yang@rmit.edu.au (R.J. Yang), hengqin.wu@connect.polyu.hk
(H. Wu), shell.x.li@connect.polyu.hk (X. Li), linxue@nju.edu.cn (X. Lin), xuef@hku.hk (F. Xue).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2020.07.007
Received 23 March 2018; Received in revised form 14 July 2020; Accepted 30 July 2020
0263-7863/© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

sustainability, project decision making and construction technology
(El-Gohary, Osman & El-Diraby, 2006; Li et al., 2016a; Yang, Wang &
Jin, 2014).
Despite the recent increase in research, published studies that provide an overview map of this complex field are lacking. Previous review
studies are based on the manual approach with the limitation on the
sampling scope (Oppong, Chan & Dansoh, 2017). Existing studies either
discuss the stakeholder management under the concept of the general
construction industry without highlighting the specific characteristics
of each sub-theme (Yang et al., 2009b) or only focus on one particular theme, lacking the overview of the whole knowledge domain (MOK
et al., 2015). In addition, comprehensively analysing citation information which reveals the chronological patterns and clustered topics in the
literature is difficult for the traditional manual review studies (Li, Wu,
Shen, Wang & Teng, 2017c). To address the deficiencies, bibliometric
techniques have been developed to find the bibliographic connections
among relevant literature quantitatively and accurately. With the help
of bibliometric tools, such as Citespace and Citnet, visualising the knowledge map of SPCP is possible, and connections among various studies
are revealed easily and unbiasedly because interpretations are obtained
less subjectively, especially compared with the manual review method
(Chen, Hu, Liu & Tseng, 2012).
This study aims to understand the past, current and future trends of
SPCP by drawing a full picture of existing research domains and highlighting the milestones in this field. This study undertakes a bibliometric
analysis of SPCP-related publications from three perspectives: document
co-citation, keyword co-occurrence and timespan citation analyses. Using these quantitative means, the study explores the knowledge domain
(structured research area) and knowledge evolution (key literature milestones) in this field. The knowledge frontier with the current gaps based
on the literature from 2015 to 2017 are then highlighted. Finally, a
knowledge map about SPCP is proposed, including evolution, domain
and frontier, to contribute to the future development of SPCP.

holder management theories: one was written by Yang et al. (2009b),
which was the first review paper to overview the previous studies in
the construction field; another was written by Mok et al. (2015), which
focused on the stakeholder management in the megaprojects; and the
third one was by Oppong et al. (2017), which was mainly on the issues
of stakeholder management performance.
Yang et al. (2009b) systematically extended general stakeholder theories into the construction sector. The authors pointed out the importance of establishing a practical framework and conducting network
analysis on stakeholder management in construction projects. As a pioneering review paper on SPCP research, the research objective was
focused on general construction projects. As the construction has the
fast development in the past ten years, SPCP research has been made to
achieve better collaborations of stakeholders in many specific branches
(i.e. urban development, megaproject, sustainability, construction technology). Thus, the previous review paper did not reflect the latest trend
of SPCP research across the various sub-areas of the construction industry. According to the statistics of Web of Science, the SPCP publication after 2009 reaches 855 whereas there are only 143 related
publications before 2009, which shows the dramatic increase in the
SPCP research calling for the new holistic knowledge map. After that,
Mok et al. (2015) reviewed stakeholder studies on megaprojects, since
when it has become one of the highest cited articles in the Web of Science database. However, the review paper was in the scope of megaprojects which is lacking a full picture of the other construction types.
Oppong et al. (2017) published a review paper on measuring stakeholder management performance. Since the stakeholder evaluation is
one component of the framework of stakeholder management (Yang &
Shen, 2014), more advanced analysis tools are still waiting for the review in other components, such as stakeholder identification and stakeholder assessment.
In summary, these three manual reviews have played important roles
in the development of SPCP research, there are still improvements that
can be made. First, all three papers focused on the review of stakeholder
management theories. They have not covered the wide applications of
stakeholder analysis in various specific construction projects, thus not
showing the multi-disciplinary trend in this research field. Second, each
of the three review papers did not cover a large dataset as the limitation
of searching terms. The authors referred the construction projects with
the terms, including “construction projects”, “infrastructure projects”,
and “civil engineering projects”. However, it is doubtful that the group
of search terms is sufficient to describe the different kinds of construction work. Some literature is likely to be missed if only “construction”,
“infrastructure”, and “civil engineering” are used as search terms to describe the type of projects in the field of construction. Therefore, the
expansion of search terms is needed to provide a full picture of construction projects.

2. Background
2.1. Stakeholder analysis in construction projects
The Stanford Research Institute first took the concept of stakeholder
into the management domain in 1963. Then the stakeholder was clearly
regarded as a critical part of strategic management in a book written
by Freeman. In that book, the stakeholder is defined as a group or
an individual who can impact or be impacted by the achievement of
the firm’s objectives (Freeman, 1984). Initially, the concept of stakeholder was focused on the corporation management until the Project
Management Institute extended this concept to the project management (Institute, 1987). Then, the later studies furtherly have identified
the stakeholders of a construction project not only include the project
members within the project (i.e. owner, consultant, contractor, suppliers), but also involve members from the project environs. (i.e. government, local community, public media). Based on stakeholders in construction projects, stakeholder studies initiated with the exploration of
the stakeholder theories, management process, and analysis methods
(Aaltonen, Jaakko & Tuomas, 2008; Yang et al., 2009b). According to
the findings of these fundamental researches, a systematic management
framework was established by Yang and Shen (2014). After that, stakeholder analysis has been conducted in different construction branches
to help researchers to study on various construction related problems
from perspectives of stakeholder influence, stakeholder concerns, stakeholder expectations, and public participation(Li, Ng & Skitmore, 2012a,
2013; Olander, 2007; Zhuang, Qian, Visscher & Elsinga, 2017).

3. Research method
3.1. Bibliometric method for knowledge exploration
With the development of information technology, scientific index,
and visualization techniques, the bibliometric method provides researchers with a way to understand the connections and trends in the
literature. Bibliometric techniques explore the unheeded linkages based
on the bibliographic records of the literature. For instance: co-citation
analysis is helpful to cluster the scientific documents according to their
citation links and semantic similarities (Chen, Ibekwe‐sanjuan & Hou,
2010); co-occurrence keyword analysis is beneficial for the detection of
the main research topics and methodologies in one research field (Su &
Lee, 2010); and Timespan analysis is a useful way to find the dynamics of research themes in terms of timeline(Abu, 2016). Besides these
techniques, there are some tools, such as Citespace, Citnet, Bibexcel,
Sci2, and VantagePoint, which visualizes the knowledge map of literature and provides detailed statistical results of the bibliometric analysis

2.2. Former review studies on SPCP
There are three important review papers in the field of SPCP research, all three of which were manual reviews and focused on stake314

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International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

Table 1
The dataset for bibliometric analysis.

(Cobo, López‐herrera, Herrera‐viedma & Herrera, 2011). Among these
tools, Citespace is a powerful software to do the co-citation analysis
and co-occurrence keyword analysis (Chen et al., 2012), while Citnet
is good for the detection of high frequent citation articles in a timeline
(Van Eck & Waltman, 2014). In the field of construction management,
a BIM knowledge map has been successfully completed through a bibliometric approach (LI et al., 2017c). Therefore, combined with bibliometric techniques and visualization tools, it would be feasible to make
a systematic exploration of SPCP knowledge and establish a knowledge
map to show an overview of the research field.

Duration

After Step 1

After Step 2

Until 2017
2015–2017

998
526

752
408

domain (Chen et al., 2010). Based on this rule, the co-citation network
is created in which the individual node representing each article in the
dataset establishes a link between two co-cited articles. In the network,
the individual nodes could be clustered into several groups by their interconnectivity, which helps to identify each of the knowledge domains
in one research area (Li et al., 2017c).

3.2. Data collection
3.2.1. The database
Web of Science (WoS) is the database that was used in this research
to find the literature related to the research field. It contains the major
scientific publications, including literatures collected by Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), which was the
database in many previous bibliometric studies as providing the comprehensive bibliographic records to conduct statistical analysis (Chen et al.,
2012; Chen, Dubin & Kim, 2014). There are several kinds of documents
collected by WoS, such as articles, proceedings papers, reviews, editorial material, and meeting abstracts. In this study, the peer-reviewed
articles and reviews were chosen for analysis since they are considered
to have better academic standing, which is in accordance with the recent
review studies done by Mok et al. (2015) and Derakhshan, Turner and
Mancini (2019).

3.3.2. Keyword co-occurrence analysis
Keyword co-occurrence analysis detects the frequency of the keywords that occur in different articles of the dataset. If one word or phrase
is used as the keyword in many articles of the dataset, it is considered
that this word or phrase might indicate one of the research focuses in this
area (Chen et al., 2012). Hence, these co-occurrence keywords could be
regarded as the knowledge base of the study’s research issues (Li et al.,
2017c).
3.3.3. Time-span citation analysis
Time-span citation analysis detects high-impact articles in different
periods during the development of the research issue. By counting the
citations of the articles in the dataset, the most frequently cited articles
could be found in a given time span (Van Eck & Waltman, 2014). From
a timeline perspective, it is important that the most frequently cited
articles in each period be tracked because the change of those articles
in each stage shows the knowledge evolution in this research area.

3.2.2. The searching terms
The searching terms are formed by two parts. One is stakeholderrelated words including “stakeholder”, “’project participant” and
“project environment”, which are referred by the previous review studies (Mok et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2009b). Another is project-related
words that are necessary to be expanded for better describing different
types of construction as previously stated in 2.2.
In general, there are three types of construction projects: building, infrastructure, and industrial (Chitkara, 1998). Based on the classification
standard of the Engineering News-Record (ENR), infrastructure could be
further divided into 17 sub-groups, and industrial is formed by 6 types
of projects (Enr, 2014; Halpin, 2010). Additionally, large construction
projects are often referred to as “megaprojects” (Mok et al., 2015), construction projects conducted by government are usually termed “public works” (Jacobson & Ok Choi, 2008), and “civil engineering” is also
regarded as one major expression of construction type in many cases
(Oppong et al., 2017).
Consequently, a framework of searching terms as Table S1 in the
appendix is built for the data collection. The wildcard character ∗ is
used to deal with relevant variations of one word, such as “construction
project” and “construction projects”. The final searching string consists
of stakeholder-related words and project-related words by Boolean operator ∗ AND∗ /∗ OR∗ (Di Maddaloni & Davis, 2017), shown in Table S2
in appendix.

3.4. Framework of research method
With the help of the three basic bibliometric techniques mentioned
above, it is feasible to draw the framework of the research method as
shown in Fig. 1.
Step 1: The data collection was conducted with the keywords formed
by stakeholder-related and project-related words with WoS database.
The bibliographical records were extracted for further analysis.
Step 2: The data retrieval was made manually based on the twostage process adopted by previous literature studies (Mok et al., 2015;
Yang, Shen, Ho, Drew & Xue, 2011) to filter out the irrelevant literature.
In the first stage, publications not including the keywords in the title or
the abstract were screened out. In the second stage, the less irrelevant
literature was excluded through the fast scanning of the content of the
title and abstract in each record. After that, the remaining records were
for the later bibliometric analysis.
Step 3: The data analysis was processed by three bibliometric methods. First, time-span citation analysis traced the knowledge evolution of
SPCP. Second, the document co-citation analysis was used to find the
knowledge domain of SPCP. Third, keyword co-occurrence analysis explored the knowledge frontier of SPCP. The whole dataset was used in
the first and second procedures to reflect the existing achievements in
SPCP. While the dataset used in the third analysis covered publications
from 2015 to 2017 for showing the latest research trend.
Step 4: The holistic knowledge map of SPCP was drawn according to
the results of data analysis.

3.2.3. Bibliographic records
In this study, according to the previous bibliometric study by
Li et al. (2017c), bibliographic records from the web of science are used,
which includes the name list of authors, the title, the abstract, the keywords, the volume number, the DOI reference, and all the references
cited by the article.
3.3. Data analysis

4. Results
3.3.1. Document co-citation analysis
Document co-citation analysis detects the distribution of frequent
co-cited articles in the dataset. As each scientific paper has a list of references, if two articles are often co-cited in the reference list of different papers, it is likely that these two articles share a similar research

4.1. Results of data collection
As Table 1 shows, after the step 1 described in Fig. 1, a total of
998 publications were found in the WoS database, including 526 (53%)
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International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

Fig. 1. Research framework of this study.

Table 2
Top-ranked clusters.
Cluster ID

Size

Silhouette-value

Cluster Name

Category

0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

36
31
30
29
26
20
17
14
13
11
11
11
11
10

0.794
0.784
0.912
0.965
0.932
0.994
1
1
1
1
0.96
0.972
0.965
0.994

Social competencies
Decision-making strategies
Risk path
Building information modelling
Stakeholder management
PPP project
Sustainability deliverable
Wind turbine
Building assessment tool
Waste management
Systems integration
Green real estate development
Sustainability assessment
Project delay

Society
Tool
Project
Tool
Project
Project
Sustainability
Sustainability
Sustainability
Sustainability
Tool
Sustainability
Sustainability
Project

published in the last three years (Deadline of data collection was on
31/12/2017). It can be seen from the data that SPCP related research
has developed the fastest in the past three years, which indicates the
need for a new map to show the current knowledge domain in this field.
After step 2 described in Fig. 1, 752 such publications, including 408
in the last three years, were chosen to form the dataset by two-stage
process in the data retrieval. The dataset completed after Step 2 was
used for further analysis.

the society related issue is a major knowledge domain in SPCP. The
building information modelling (Cluster 3) is another critical area. On
one hand, many BIM studies focus on stakeholder participation in construction projects. One the other hand, the approaches of stakeholder
analysis are under fast development with the support of the advanced
construction technology. Interestingly, the theoretical studies in stakeholder management (Cluster 4) are not in the largest cluster, as it is
ranked behind social issues and BIM studies. The result proves the necessity of bibliometric analysis in SPCP to explore the wider research
areas besides the stakeholder theories which have been summarized by
former reviews. Another significant knowledge domain is on the issue of
sustainability. A group of top-ranked clusters is related to this topic, including sustainability deliverable (Cluster 6), wind turbine (Cluster 7),
waste management (Cluster 9), green real estate development (Cluster
11), and sustainability assessment (Cluster 12).

4.2. Knowledge domain
The literature co-citation network can be clustered into groups by the
interconnectivity of the nodes. Cluster labels are then derived by using
a statistical method called LLR (log-likelihood ratio test). This method
labels each cluster by calculating and ranking the significant value of
words that frequently appear in the abstract of publications from the
network (Chen et al., 2010).
Fig. 2 shows the result of the clustering analysis in the field of SPCP.
There are 14 large clusters listed in Table 2 with each one having at
least 10 group members. The Silhouette-value of each cluster is more
than 0.75, which means the result is valid and can be used for further
interpretation (Chen et al., 2010). The largest cluster is the social competencies (Cluster 0), which includes 36 publications. This cluster shows

4.3. Knowledge evolution
The result of the time-span analysis is shown in Fig. 3. As the graph
shows, knowledge evolution can be divided into four stages in terms of
the timeline. The first stage is the period before 1990s, which is the birth
stage of SPCP. The second stage is the growth stage when stakeholder
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International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

Fig. 2. Clusters of knowledge domains on SPCP research.
Table 3
Key milestones of SPCP research by timeline.
Birth (Before 1990s)

Growth (1991–2000)

Prosperity (2001–2010)

Orientation (2011–2017)

Concepts of stakeholders:
Public participation:
Arnstein (1969)
Stakeholder:
Freeman (1984)
Morris, Pwg (1987)
Methods of stakeholders:
AHP:
Saaty, Tl (1980)
Case study:
Eisenhardt, Km (1989)

Identification of stakeholders:
Mitchell et al. (1997)

Management of stakeholders:
Social related issues
Social acceptance:
Rolf Wüstenhagen et al. (2007)

Complexity of stakeholders:
Stakeholder concerns:
H.Y.Li (2012)

Assessment of stakeholders:
Critical success factors:
Sanvido et al. (1992)
Network analysis:
Wasserman (1994)
Timothy J. Rowley (1997)

Sustainability related issues
Wind power projects:
Patrick Devine Wright (2005)
Project related issues
PPP projects:
Nora M. El-Gohary (2006)
Influence of stakeholders:
Stefan Olander (2005)
Derek H.T. Walker (2005)
Stefan Olander (2007)

Megaprojects:
Flyvbjerg, B (2014)
Ka Yan Mok (2015)

4.4. Knowledge frontier

perspective studies first started to appear in the 1990s. The third stage
is the prosperity stage from 2000 to 2010, during which time a lot of
classical SPCP research was undertaken. The fourth stage is the new research orientation era since 2011, during which some new directions of
SPCP have been presented. The knowledge evolution path is presented
according to the key milestones of SPCP as shown in Table. 3. In the
first stage there only a few frequently cited papers, although each one
played a fundamental role in the field of SPCP by providing the basic
concepts and methodologies. In the second stage, there were two major occurrences: methods on stakeholder identification and assessment.
In the third stage, there are a lot of stakeholder perspective researches
emerging in various sub-areas of SPCP. In the fourth stage, some very
frequently cited articles indicated the new direction in the field of SPCP.

The keywords co-occurrence network from 2015 to 2017 is shown
in Fig. 4 which highlights the most frequent occurrence keywords by
larger characters. Based on the most frequently used terms, the latest
research frontier is presented by three aspects: research topics, targets,
and methods. The popular terms under each aspect are shown in Fig. 5
which have interdependencies with each other. For instance, according
to the linkage information of the network, the stakeholder analysis has
been conducted on sustainability in megaprojects and ppp projects respectively. The stakeholder issues in megaprojects have been discussed
by case study. The network analysis has been applied to analyse the
stakeholder performance in the BIM management process.

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Fig. 3. Results of Time-span analysis.

Fig. 4. Keywords co-occurrence network from 2015 to 2017.

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Fig. 5. Current hot terms in the latest SPCP research.

5. Discussion and implications

(Arnstein, 1969). In the citizen ladder proposed by Arnstein (1969),
public participation was assessed by citizen power, which first highlighted the impact of external stakeholders (general public, NGO and
government) engagement towards construction projects. Since then, a
number of urban studies were at the stakeholder engagement level
(Larson, Measham & Williams, 2010; Mahjabeen, Shrestha & Dee, 2003),
and they provided various engagement methods for project stakeholders in practice, including interviews, forums, focus groups, surveys and
workshops (Larson et al., 2010). The concept of public participation
was then further introduced into the stakeholder management domain
as the term ‘stakeholder participation’ (Li, Ng, Skitmore & Li, 2016b).
Stakeholder participation was considered an essential engagement to
improve the chance of project success by prioritising stakeholder concerns (Li et al., 2012a) and maximising stakeholder satisfaction (Li et al.,
2013).
In the aspect of stakeholder methodologies, Saaty (1980) was the
first to introduce the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model, an essential tool to analyse the complex multi-criteria decisions among project
stakeholders. Given the lack of participatory tools in stakeholder negotiations, the AHP method is useful for stakeholder involvement in
the group decision judgement process (Ananda & Herath, 2003). The
method was widely used to integrate stakeholder preferences in the
decision-making process in transportation planning (Dalal, Mohapatra &
Mitra, 2010; Wakchaure & Jha, 2012), quality management (Lam, Lam
& Wang, 2008) and construction sustainability assessment (Alwaer &
Clements-Croome, 2010; Mostafa & El-Gohary, 2014).
Case study was another critical method. Eisenhardt (1989) introduced this method as a suitable means for exploring a new research
area with inadequate existing theories. Exploratory case study was popular in the stakeholder management domain for studying the problems
and challenges of SPCP (Mok, Shen & Yang, 2017a). Based on another
classical study by Yin (2003)), case study can be divided into two approaches: single-case research and multiple-cases study. Generally, most
case studies in the stakeholder management domain are single-case studies (Mok, Shen & Yang, 2017b; Ogunlana, 2010) or two-comparativecases studies (Olander & Landin, 2005, 2008; Yang et al., 2014). A
limitation of the small number of cases is the generalisations of the
research findings, which is a bottleneck in the development of SPCP
(Mok, Shen, Yang & Li, 2017c). The information-oriented case sampling
strategy was applied to minimise the restrictions of the small sample
size (Flyvbjerg, 2006).

5.1. Milestones in the development of SPCP
The literature milestones in each stage obtained from the timespan
analysis (see Table 3) highlight the classical research findings in SPCP.
Generally, the knowledge trend starts at the birth of basic stakeholder
concepts and methods, followed by the formation of stakeholder theories and then the application stage in various sub-areas. This trend
indicates the direction of SPCP from the explorations of fundamental
theories to the practice in multi-disciplinary areas of the construction
industry.
5.1.1. Birth stage: concept and method of stakeholders
The first stage is the birth of the basic concepts and methodologies
in SPCP. In terms of stakeholder concepts, the noticeable definition of
stakeholders came from the famous book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach written by Freeman (1984). A clear definition of stakeholder was first suggested in this book: ‘any group or individual who
can affect or is affected by the achievement of the firm’s objectives’.
This definition set the foundation of stakeholder management and was
further interpreted by Cleland and Kerzner (1986), who listed eighteen project stakeholders, bringing the stakeholder concept from corporation management into project management. Following, Morris and
Hough (1987) first pointed out that multi-organisational management
is a determinant of large complex projects’ success, indicating the importance of stakeholder concept in the construction project management domain. Afterward, terms like ‘group and individual’ and ‘affect and affected’ developed by Freeman (1984) were finally incorporated and translated into the project stakeholder concept defined by
Project Management Institute (PMI) (Institute, 1987) as ‘those individuals and organisations actively involved in a project or whose interests
may be affected as a result of project execution or completion’. Basing on the definitions of Freeman and PMI, the stakeholder concept
was further described by various categories: external/internal (Atkin &
Skitmore, 2008), direct/indirect (Lester, 2006), proponents/opponents
(Bonke & Winch, 2002) and core/fringe (Hart & Sharma, 2004).
Another critical concept was public participation, which was an incentive to initiate stakeholder analysis in construction projects. Through
the fast development of the economy, the demand for proper management strategies appeared as the frequent interactions between the
public and traditional project stakeholders in urban renewal projects
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International Journal of Project Management 38 (2020) 313–326

5.1.2. Growth stage: identification and assessment of stakeholders
In the early 1990s, SPCP reached the growth stage wherein methods
to address the problems of stakeholder identification and assessment
were proposed. The ‘power, legitimacy, urgency’ model proposed by
Mitchell, Agle and Wood (1997) set the principles to insightfully identify
the critical stakeholder by its influence level on organisational activities.
The model is the influential work for identifying critical stakeholders by
their attributes and is the basis of a series of critical stakeholder identification methods, including the ‘power/interest matrix’ (Scholes, Johnson
& Whittington, 2002) and ‘stakeholder circle methodology’ (Bourne &
Walker, 2005). However, the static attributes-based model cannot reflect the stakeholder dynamics as the levels of attributes often vary
over time through the development of construction projects (Yang et al.,
2009b).
In terms of stakeholder assessment, two significant methods
emerged. One approach is the critical success factors (CFSs) that
was first identified by Sanvido, Grobler, Parfitt, Guvenis and
Coyle (1992) in the construction industry. Since then CSFs and the
related survey-based method have become an essential part of SPCP.
Sanvido et al. (1992) claimed that various stakeholders (owners, designers and contractors) had common and unique CSFs in construction
projects and that exploring these factors was worthwhile for achieving project success. Cleland (1999) then emphasised the significance
of CSFs in stakeholder management seeing that the project team must
know whether the project stakeholders were managed successfully or
not. The CSFs of stakeholder management in construction projects were
discovered by Yang, Shen, Drew and Ho (2009a), and they were stakeholder identification, assessment, decision making, action and evaluation and continuous support. The identified CSFs of stakeholder management was further applied by Oppong et al. (2017) to guide the strategies
for improving stakeholder management performance. As CSFs are significantly related to management performance, the assessment of the
preferred CSFs of project stakeholders attracted a group of SPCP in a
broad theme, such as green buildings and public–private partnership
(PPP) projects (Liang, Shen & Guo, 2015; Osei-Kyei & Chan, 2017).
Another assessment tool was network analysis, which was comprehensively presented by a book written by Wasserman and Faust (1994).
The book introduced social network analysis (SNA) as a relational measure to systematically assess the interactions among various organisations. Later, Rowley (1997) was the first to analyse stakeholder influence
with SNA by combining the methodology of SNA with a stakeholderrelated study. Afterward, Yang et al. (2009b) adopted the SNA technique
to analyse the stakeholder relationship in construction projects because
it was useful to visualise and examine various project stakeholders as a
system rather than a group of independent focal organisations with the
dyadic ties presented by Freeman (1984). The SNA approach was further recommended by Mok et al. (2015) for stakeholder analysis on the
complexities in mega construction projects. Currently, two types of SNA
approaches are employed for stakeholder assessment. One is to evaluate the relationship among project stakeholders (Mok et al., 2017a).
Another is to assess the interactions of stakeholder-associated issues in
the projects (Mok et al., 2017c). Both approaches provide researchers
with a robust assessment tool to understand the stakeholder positions in
construction projects.

risks entails seeking of effective assessment tools, involvement processes
and response strategies. The stakeholder network evaluation approach
was developed by Boutilier and Zdziarski (2017) to assist project managers in maintaining a high level of social license for a project. In addition, Benn, Dunphy and Martin (2009) established the stakeholder involvement framework to address the socio-political risks by considering
stakeholder interactions, narrative theory, leadership styles and reflexive management. Moreover, Aaltonen and Sivonen (2009) provided the
response strategies for project stakeholder pressures on social-political
issues, including adaptation strategy, compromising strategy, avoidance
strategy, dismissal strategy and influence strategy. The management of
community stakeholders was focused on identification, impact analysis and managerial implications. The identification of community stakeholders was categorised into four groups: communities of place, communities of interests, communities of practice and virtual advocacy groups
(Dunham, Freeman & Liedtka, 2006). These stakeholders were considered to exert unseen power and influence on the success of project delivery (Bourne & Walker, 2005; Olander & Landin, 2008). The engagement
of community stakeholders in decision making is essential to improve
the stakeholder management of construction projects (Di Maddaloni &
Davis, 2017). The stakeholder management of the construction marketing issues led to the research on stakeholder perspective measurement,
which was beneficial for improving organisation business performance
in the construction market (Love & Holt, 2000; Rodriguez‐Melo & Mansouri, 2011).
In the aspect of sustainability, public perception was discussed in wind energy projects, which emphasized the essence
of general public support and local community involvement on
project success (Devine‐Wright, 2005). The leading research by
Devine‐Wright (2005) indicates the criticalness of external stakeholder management in green projects. The external stakeholder management of green projects consists of understanding the stakeholder
visions (Château, Chang, Chen & Ko, 2012), organising effective
stakeholder consultation and involvement (Gray, Haggett & Bell,
2005; Martin & Rice, 2015) and encouraging stakeholder empowerment (Alvial-Palavicino, Garrido-Echeverría, Jiménez-Estévez, Reyes &
Palma-Behnke, 2011). In terms of stakeholder visions, besides the traditional community meeting method (Hall & Lazarus, 2015), a group
modelling approach was introduced to simulate the stakeholder visions
on wind farm projects. This approach provided an innovative simulation
perspective to understand the stakeholder perception with the proposed
management strategy before implementation (Château et al., 2012).
Moreover, integrated with the stakeholder studies in green projects, the
conceptual framework of stakeholder participation was finally developed by Jami and Walsh (2014) to guide stakeholder consultation in
wind energy projects through five steps: inform, consult, involve, collaborate and empower.
In the project domain, the stakeholder involvement model was established for managing stakeholders in PPP projects (El-Gohary et al.,
2006). The model was built for better communication among project
proponents and stakeholders by capturing and integrating stakeholder
interests in the management process. The article opened the window
for other SPCP on the management process in PPP projects. Focused
on the stakeholder management process, Henjewele, Fewings and Rwelamila (2013) proposed a multi-stakeholder management framework for
PPP projects by combining the management process with project phases,
which assisted project managers in stakeholder management in the PPP
project lifecycle. Ng, Wong and Wong (2013) enhanced the stakeholder
management process of PPP projects by linking stakeholder engagement
activities in each project phase. In response to the stakeholder dynamics in the management process, the dynamic dual stakeholder management tool and ex-ante stakeholder inclusion were introduced to mitigate
stakeholder conflicts, and they further upgraded the stakeholder management process in PPP projects (De Schepper, Dooms & Haezendonck,
2014).

5.1.3. Prosperity stage: management and influence of stakeholders
In the third stage, SPCP were prosperous as they gradually extended
the knowledge domain from general stakeholder theories to specific
sub-areas of the project issues, including stakeholder management on
social acceptance, sustainability and PPP projects. Regarding socialrelated issues, social acceptance was conceptualised by three aspects:
socio-political acceptance, community acceptance and market acceptance, which required the support of a wide range of stakeholders towards a specific project (Wüstenhagen, Wolsink & Bürer, 2007). The
three aspects set a model on how to evaluate the social impact on
stakeholder perspective. The stakeholder management of socio-political
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Furthermore, stakeholder influence analysis was particularly discussed, leading to the development of the measurement tools. The
source of major measurement tools was the ‘power, legitimacy, urgency’ model (Mitchell et al., 1997). The reason is that power is considered the critical attribute to assess stakeholder influence. Three classical tools were developed in this period. Firstly, the power/interest
matrix was first proposed by Scholes et al. (2002) in the corporate
management. Olander and Landin (2005) then introduced this tool into
project management by mapping the stakeholders and their influences
in two construction projects. Secondly, the stakeholder circle was designed by Bourne and Walker (2005) to visualise the power and influence of stakeholders in a project. Thirdly, Olander (2007) developed
the stakeholder impact index by integrating the stakeholder attribute
model (Mitchell et al., 1997), stakeholder position theory (McElroy &
Mills, 2000) and power/interest matrix (Scholes et al., 2002). The index
tool was further enhanced by Nguyen, Skitmore and Wong (2009) by
supplementing the perspective of stakeholder knowledge. However, the
series of stakeholder influence analysis tools relied heavily on the cognitive information of project managers, and thus lacked efficiency when
employed in complex construction projects (Yang et al., 2009b).

society and sustainability are two interesting focal areas. The former has
the largest cluster, whereas the latter contains the greatest number of
clusters, representing the hotspots in SPCP.
Regarding the largest cluster, society-related issues (Cluster 0 in
Table 2) represent a major knowledge domain in SPCP, which is echoed
by the social impact research from Di Maddaloni and Davis (2017) and
Boutilier and Zdziarski (2017). As public participation is a critical driving force to stimulate the demand for stakeholder studies stated in
5.1, many discussions in SPCP are on how to deal with the interactions between project stakeholders and the public (Jami & Walsh, 2014;
Li, Thomas Ng & Skitmore, 2015; Xie, Yang, Hu & Chan, 2014). To
achieve better performance in stakeholder interactions, a fuzzy approach was adopted to test stakeholder satisfaction during the public’s
participation in a construction project (LI et al., 2013). Corporate social
responsibility in construction projects was also studied from the perspective of stakeholder power (Lin, Ho & Shen, 2018b). The hierarchy of
stakeholder power on social responsibility in construction projects was
discussed through stakeholder impact and stakeholder network analyses (Lin, Ho & Shen, 2017, 2018a). Moreover, most public works attract huge public attention because they use the public budget and have
deep social impact, thus requiring clear identifications of stakeholder
concerns to detect the key challenges and associated risks among stakeholders (Li et al., 2016b; Li, Ng & Skitmore, 2012b; Mok et al., 2017c).
Six clusters related to the knowledge domain of sustainability in
SPCP, which indicates the wide application of stakeholder analysis in
the field, also echoed by Hörisch, Freeman and Schaltegger (2014).
Generally, the sustainability domain can be divided into three parts.
The first part is to introduce stakeholder analysis to the approaches
for sustainability assessment (Clusters 6, 8 and 12 in Table 2) in
construction projects. For the evaluation of project sustainability, the
environmental assessment method was developed from stakeholder
perspective, and stakeholder-associated risks were assessed (Wong &
Abe, 2014; Yang, Zou & Wang, 2016). To achieve better sustainable projects, the cost of sustainability-related components was analysed from the stakeholder perspective (Goh & Yang, 2014). The second part is stakeholder engagement in green energy projects. One
hotspot is the wind energy projects (Cluster 7 in Table 2). It has
not been mentioned in any review papers of SPCP but in fact consists of a group of studies on stakeholder engagement detected by
clustering analysis. It includes stakeholder engagement in the aspects
of community participation, value-sensitive design, land use planning
and energy policy (Alvial-Palavicino et al., 2011; Gold, 2011; Hall &
Lazarus, 2015; Martin & Rice, 2015; Oosterlaken, 2015; Veidemane &
Nikodemus, 2015). SPCP on wind energy projects can set a valuable
reference to guide subsequent studies of stakeholder engagement in
other renewable energy projects. The third part concerns stakeholder
involvement of environmental protection in construction projects. One
application is in waste management (Cluster 9 in Table 2). The research advocates that the amelioration of stakeholders’ awareness and
behaviour is a useful measure for dealing with construction waste
(Lu, Peng, Webster & Zuo, 2015; Saez, Del Río Merino, González &
Porras-Amores, 2013; Yuan, 2013). Another application focuses on
green real estate projects (Cluster 11 in Table 2). The key stakeholders were identified, and the transaction costs of these stakeholders
were analysed to maximise the value of environment-friendly building projects (Li, Wu & Wu, 2017b; Qian, Chan & Khalid, 2015; Zhang,
2015).
The other two knowledge domains in SPCP are tool and project issues. Regarding tool-related issues, SPCP have developed a series of effective approaches to analyse problems in construction project management (Mok et al., 2015). Stakeholder assessment is a critical analytical
component in the decision-making process (Cluster 1 in Table 2), which
is useful in identifying stakeholder-associated risks in the early stage of
projects (Williams, Ferdinand & Pasian, 2015; Yang et al., 2014). Moreover, the development of building information modelling (BIM) technology (Cluster 3 in Table 2) provides a new tool to integrate stakeholder

5.1.4. Orientation stage: complexity of stakeholders
In the fourth stage, SPCP turned to the complexity of stakeholders
as construction projects became increasingly complicated, which indicated new orientations in this field. Firstly, SPCP concentrated on the
complexity of stakeholder concerns because conflicting concerns among
stakeholders intensified project complexity (Atkin & Skitmore, 2008).
The research of stakeholder concerns was started by LI et al. (2012a),
who emphasised the criticalness of exploring the conflicts and consensus from the multiple stakeholder concerns. The stakeholder concerns were further considered as an aspect of stakeholder complexity by
Mok et al. (2017a), who recommended the network analysis approach to
analyse the complex interactions of stakeholder concerns. The networkbased approach was explicitly introduced to reduce stakeholder complexity by identifying the critical position of stakeholder concerns with
theoretical network indicators (Mok et al., 2017c). With the prioritisation of stakeholder concerns by network analysis, a group of project
risks and challenges were detected in a variety of projects, including infrastructure (Mok et al., 2017c), urban redevelopment (Yu et al., 2017)
and prefabricated housing projects (Luo, Qiping Shen, Xu, Liu & Wang,
2019).
Secondly, megaprojects have played a significant role in SPCP in recent years. The megaproject review written by Flyvbjerg (2014) was
widely cited in SPCP. Mok et al. (2015) followed this trend and wrote
an influential review paper on stakeholder studies in mega construction projects. This paper provided a national culture analysis, a lifecycle analysis and a SNA and established a database which formed the
four major directions for SPCP when facing the complexity in megaprojects (Mok et al., 2015). Subsequently, stakeholder investigations of
megaprojects were undertaken under various national cultural contexts to understand the stakeholder management measures in different
countries (Di Maddaloni & Davis, 2018; Park, Kim, Kim & Kim, 2017;
Yang et al., 2018). Moreover, stakeholder management studies of longterm megaprojects were conducted to explore the stakeholder dynamics in complex project environment (Eskerod & Ang, 2017; Park et al.,
2017). SNA was employed to visualise stakeholder complexity and manage stakeholder relationship in megaprojects (Mok et al., 2017b). However, a stakeholder database of megaprojects is lacking to provide adequate empirical data for generalising the stakeholder theories facing the
complexity of megaprojects.
5.2. Major knowledge domains of SPCP
According to the clustering results of co-citation analysis, the knowledge domains of SPCP can be further interpreted as four major issues:
society, sustainability, analytical tool and project management. Of them,
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information for achieving better stakeholder collaboration (He et al.,
2017b; Li et al., 2017a, 2016a). SPCP also explore approaches to address the conflicts arising from complex system integration (Cluster 10
in Table 2) (Davies & Mackenzie, 2014; Mok et al., 2017a). In terms
of project-related issues, SPCP contributes to construction project management research (Oppong et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2009b). Firstly,
general stakeholder theories in construction projects are included
under this domain as the essence of stakeholder management (Cluster 4
in Table 2) on improving project performance (Atkin & Skitmore, 2008;
Mok et al., 2015; Yang & Shen, 2014). Secondly, stakeholder evaluations are incorporated into other critical project management studies,
including project risk and schedule management (Clusters 2 and 13 in
Table 2), for enhancing the relevant management performance from
stakeholder perspective (Benn et al., 2009; Braeckman & Guthrie, 2016;
Valentin, Naderpajouh & Abraham, 2018; Zhao et al., 2016).

management in megaprojects has been summarised case by case, generalised rules and guides are waiting to be concluded at the geographical level (Mok et al., 2015). PPP projects present a similar situation
is SPCP. The limitation of the generalisability of research findings is
highlighted due to the sampling scope (Osei-Kyei & Chan, 2017) and
inborn case deficiencies (Amadi, Carrillo & Tuuli, 2018; De Schepper
et al., 2014). One possible solution is to establish a database to organise the collected data in various empirical stakeholder research, as suggested by Mok et al. (2015). The database will be beneficial for future
researchers of SPCP to generalise their findings through comprehensive
data and cases. Although the database-driven stakeholder research was
adopted in the area of corporate strategic management (Odziemkowska
& Henisz, 2016), an open-source database remains lacking in SPCP. In
summary, as the complexity increases the difficulties for exploring the
unified management standard, SPCP should start with a case study, and
future studies should generalise existing findings.

5.3. Trends in the frontier of SPCP
5.3.3. Dynamic and simulation stakeholder analysis in the uncertain
project environment
Faced with the uncertainty in the lifecycle of construction projects,
stakeholder studies require effective approaches to analyse the dynamics of stakeholder interactions (De Schepper et al., 2014) and propose
strategies to improve the resilience against unpredictable events among
stakeholders (De Meyer et al., 2002). The current research methods
showed in Fig. 5 are still the classical ones initially developed before
the early 1990s, including network analysis and traditional quantitative and qualitative methods. The classical approaches require an upgrade to improve adaptability in tackling uncertainties. Regarding the
dynamic stakeholder analysis, the emerging advocacy for further studies is on how to upgrade the static network model to be a dynamic one
to reflect the change of stakeholder relationships when uncertainties
occur in construction projects (Mok et al., 2017c). The combination of
SNA and longitudinal data to conduct dynamic analysis is beneficial to
understand the development of internal and external stakeholder networks in an uncertain project environment (Zheng, Le, Chan, Hu & Li,
2016). As an effective tool to test the uncertainties in various scenarios in advance (Alzraiee, Zayed & Moselhi, 2015), another expectation
is on the simulation model for predicting the changeable stakeholder
performance during project duration. Currently, the evaluation models
based on traditional statistical methods (i.e. AHP, SEM and factor analysis) have been employed to review the stakeholder perception after
project completion (Babatunde, Perera, Zhou & Udeaja, 2016; Mojtahedi
& Oo, 2017; Moslem, Ghorbanzadeh, Blaschke & Duleba, 2019). However, in the initial stage, according to the result in 4.4, few simulation
models have been established in the field of SPCP to predict stakeholder
performance and its robustness to face uncertainties under changeable
environment in construction projects.

With the keywords co-occurrence network from 2015 to 2017 as basis, hotspots in the frontier of SPCP are explored (see Fig. 5). Generally,
the future development of SPCP corresponds to the features of modern
construction projects in search of efficient solutions to face the challenges in sustainability, complexity and uncertainty. The continuous advancement of information technology like BIM can support stakeholder
studies in tackling the challenges by providing an accurate and instant
approach for detecting stakeholder concerns and achieving better stakeholder collaboration.
5.3.1. Stakeholder engagement in sustainable urban projects
Sustainability is the hottest research topic in current SPCP. Stakeholder analysis has been conducted on energy projects (Read et al.,
2017), sustainable infrastructure (Diaz, Adler & Patt, 2017) and green
buildings (Yang et al., 2016). As urbanisation is a global trend, sustainability has become a critical topic with regard to urban issues
(Tan, Xu & Zhang, 2016). Sustainable urbanisation calls for sustainable
construction management in urban infrastructure and building projects
(Gan et al., 2015). In SPCP, stakeholder perspective studies have been
introduced into urban redevelopment projects because stakeholders are
an essential part of sustainability management (Hörisch et al., 2014).
For instance, a stakeholder-expectation-based analysis has been conducted for better sustainability performance of urban renewal projects
(Zhuang et al., 2017). Network analysis has been carried out to detect
social risks from the stakeholder perspective in an urban redevelopment
project (Yu et al., 2017). However, current studies focus on the identification of stakeholder concerns to facilitate the decision-making process.
More SPCP on stakeholder engagement in urban projects are expected,
as recommended by Gan et al. (2015), to achieve sustainability in construction project management. Sustainable urbanisation seeks the engagement of all stakeholders in a city (Enserink & Koppenjan, 2007), so
SPCP are expected to investigate stakeholder engagement by providing
efficient engagement levels and methods in different types of sustainable urban projects. This call is also echoed by Tan et al. (2016) in an
urbanisation review.

5.3.4. Advanced integrated tool for stakeholder information collection
In the history of the development of SPCP, one major obstacle is
the lack of useful solutions to collect accurate information from project
stakeholders. Without such solutions, implementing high-quality empirical studies to validate new theories and management strategies becomes difficult (Mok et al., 2017c; Osei-Kyei & Chan, 2017). Given that
the number of stakeholders involved in modern construction projects
is growing, the integration of various stakeholder information is essential for stakeholder analysis in SPCP (Mok et al., 2017a) As an information communication and sharing platform among various stakeholders(He et al., 2017a), BIM provides a new prospect to collect stakeholder
information accurately and instantly. One potential application is the
combination with Internet of Things (IoT) technology (Li et al., 2017a).
In the prefabricated housing projects, the BIM model has been combined with RFID labels to share stakeholder information for improving
schedule performance (Li et al., 2016a). In the future, more advanced
integrated information tool is expected to support SPCP in dealing with

5.3.2. Generalisation of stakeholder studies in complex construction
projects
The popular research targets are SPCP on project complexities.
As Fig. 5 shows, megaprojects and PPP projects are complex as they
involve a great number of stakeholders (De Schepper et al., 2014;
Mok et al., 2015). The complicated working interfaces require a high
level of stakeholder collaboration to face various risks in the long term
(Davies, Macaulay, Debarro & Thurston, 2014). Hence, SPCP must tackle
the challenges of project complexity from the stakeholder perspective
(Mok et al., 2017a). As stated in 5.1, megaproject has been the rising research area in SPCP. Although much experience of stakeholder
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Fig. 6. “Housing model” The SPCP knowledge map.

sustainability, complexity and uncertainty problems in construction
projects.

in SPCP, namely, stakeholder concepts, methods, identification, assessment, management, influence and complexity. The knowledge domain
indicates four major research areas of stakeholder perspective studies
concerning the issues of society, sustainability, tool and project. The society issues include the stakeholder interactions in public participation,
stakeholder power on social responsibility and stakeholder concerns in
public works. The sustainability issues cover the stakeholder analysis
in sustainability assessment, stakeholder engagement in green energy
projects and stakeholder involvement in environmental protection. The
tool issues consist of the stakeholder assessment in the decision-making
process, stakeholder integration with building information modelling
and stakeholder conflicts in system integration. The project issues are
made up of the theory of stakeholder management and stakeholder evaluation of risk and schedule management. Standing on the knowledge
frontier, future SPCP are encouraged to focus on the challenges of construction project management in the aspects of sustainability, complexity and uncertainty. Further studies regarding stakeholder engagement
in the sustainable urban projects, generalised studies tackling the complexity in complex construction projects and the dynamic and simulation
methods addressing the interactions between stakeholders and project
uncertainties are awaited. Moreover, the rising demands on instant and
accurate approach to integrating stakeholder information call for indepth research on advanced integrated information tools, such as BIM
and its related IoT technology.
The contribution of this article lies in two aspects. Theoretically,
the proposed knowledge map SPCP presents the knowledge evolution,
domain and frontier of SPCP. The traced knowledge evolution highlights seven research milestones and relevant profound influence on
the knowledge body of SPCP in history. The detected knowledge domain clearly reveals four critical research areas for the latest knowledge scope, presenting how the applications of stakeholder perspective
studies extend to multi-disciplinary areas in construction projects. The
explored knowledge frontier indicates future directions for the knowledge development of SPCP by integrating the knowledge between stakeholder studies, construction project management and information technology. Therefore, the proposed knowledge map comprehensively depicts the past, current and future of SPCP. Methodologically, an effective method to map discipline knowledge is provided with the integration of bibliometric approaches, including timespan citation, document
co-citation and keyword co-occurrence analyses. Unlike traditional literature reviews, the integrated bibliometric approach successfully explores the past, current and future of a target knowledge domain by

5.4. The knowledge map of SPCP
As Fig. 6 shows, the knowledge map of SPCP can be formed with
three components, namely, knowledge evolution, domain and frontier.
The holistic map is like a housing model. Knowledge evolution shows
the history of SPCP, which is the foundation of the housing map. Above
the foundation lies four major issues with eleven clusters of stakeholder
perspective studies that form the knowledge domain. They represent the
columns to support the whole house. At the top of the map is the roof,
illustrating the trend of knowledge frontier in three aspects, namely, sustainability, complexity and uncertainty, with the support of stakeholder
information collection tools.
The knowledge map contributes to SPCP from three aspects. Firstly,
it brings new insights into the development path of knowledge evolution
in SPCP by comprehensively highlighting seven milestones in history.
Each detected milestone has a profound influence on SPCP, which is
useful for scholars to learn the classical theories in the field. Secondly,
it provides a new perception of current multi-disciplinary knowledge
domains of SPCP with four identified research areas and eleven associated stakeholder perspective studies. This contribution benefits the
scholar to understand the existing research scopes of SPCP. Thirdly,
the knowledge-frontier roof indicates the new vision of SPCP by four
future directions synchronised with the characteristics of the construction project management (sustainability, complexity and uncertainty)
and the development of the construction information technology (BIM
and its related IoT technology). The proposed future research directions bridge knowledge domains between stakeholder studies, construction project management and information technology. In summary, the
knowledge map shows a holistic picture presenting the past, current and
future of SPCP.

6. Conclusions
This study refers to 752 stakeholder-related articles. The knowledge
evolution, domain, and frontier for SPCP are obtained systematically
through the analysis of bibliographic records. The knowledge evolution
reveals four critical development phases with seven research milestones
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reducing the impact of a researcher’s subjective opinions on the research results, thus ensuring that the results are more objective and
accurate.
Two limitations of the research are noted. Firstly, although WoS
database provides the high-standard literature that formed the dataset,
other literature databases are welcome to be included in developing
the bibliometric tool. Currently, other databases cannot provide sufficient bibliographic records owing to software compatibility. Secondly,
the knowledge map for SPCP should be updated periodically with the
development of stakeholder management practices in the construction
industry.

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Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
The research described in this paper is fully supported by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71671156).
The research is also funded by the Public Policy Research Funding
Scheme from the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project Number: 2017.A6.107.18B).
Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in
the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.ijproman.2020.07.007.
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