工程管理专业英文文献

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Language as a Resource in Project Management:

A Case Study and a Conceptual Framework

Nuno A. Gil

Abstract

—

This study sheds light on how project managers can

use language as a resource for communicating with local commu-

nities and stakeholders alike, and protect the legitimacy of their

decisions and actions. The verbal accounts produced by a senior

project management team are examined in-depth. The accounts

address the claims raised by residents affected by the expansion

of the Heathrow airport. The context for the talk-in-interaction

is one of con?icting interests: the promoter undertakes actions

to mitigate the impacts of the construction works, but some res-

idents feel frustrated that the business can grow at the expenses

of their welfare. The ?ndings reveal that managers tend to ac

-

knowledge all claims even when perceiving they lack legitimacy.

The analysis of the words and phrasing in the conversational turns

that form the accounts reveals three tones

—

caring, assertive, and

apologetic

—

that managers use intentionally to frame linguistically

the acknowledgements. The study discusses how the tones ?t with

the extent to which, ?rst, managers consider that the claims

are

factually correct, fair, and precise as opposed to unfair, exagger-

ated, or opportunistic; and second, managers ?nd technical or

institutional references available for constructing the accounts. It

also discusses the effects of congruence

—

or the lack of it

—

between

what managers mean to say about what the project team will do,

what managers actually say, how listeners interpret what was said,

and what the project team actually gets done.

Index Terms

—

Communication, language, legitimacy, local com-

munities, project stakeholder.

I. I

NTRODUCTION

P

ROJECTS are sociotechnical enterprises, and technical

know-

how alone is insuf?cient to bring a project to

successful completion. This premise makes communication

skills central to project management, as well as a behav-

ioral competence that professional associations require for cer-

ti?ed project managers [36], [52]. Communication has also

long deserved attention in the project management literature.

Gaddis’ [27] seminal article exhorts project managers to in

-

vest in learning to communicate adequately. It also notes that

frankness and integrity are key features of communication when

discussing the future. Subsequent literature on the so-called soft

side of project management

—that embodies Lechler’s [39] dic

-

tum

“when it comes to project management, it’s the people

that matter”—has since then sought to ?esh out seminal ideas

(e.g., [12], [13], and [51]).

Manuscript received December 2, 2008; revised March 31, 2009 and May

9, 2009; accepted June 24, 2009. Date of publication October 6, 2009; date

of current version July 21, 2010. Review of this manuscript was arranged by

Department Editor J. K. Pinto.

The author is with the Manchester Business School, The University of Manch-

ester, Manchester M15 6PB, U.K. (e-mail: @).

Digital Object Identi?er 10.1109/TEM.2009.2028327

One subset of this literature has focused on the communica-

tion skills necessary to effectively manage stakeholders external

to projects. This literature has focused on managing local com-

munities, media, and other constituencies (e.g., environmental-

ists and preservationists) affected by large-scale infrastructure

projects [58], [66]. The theory is underdeveloped, but the is-

sues are well understood. At the onset, project managers need

to develop a public relations plan about how to deal with the

public and media, and to divide the communication workload

among the team members [66]. To be effective, project managers

need to build coalitions and communication channels with the

affected groups, manage their expectations, listen to their con-

cerns, keep them up-to-date on project progress, attend public

meetings, and participate in community affairs [3], [12]. They

also need to foresee and forestall emergent issues, prepare de-

tailed responses, and respond quickly to misleading information

that circulates about the project [51], [66].

Collectively, these actions help project managers to make

the affected groups gain con?dence and trust in the project

team [58]. These actions may also bring on the affected groups

to see the project as an opportunity to improve their welfare

rather than a threat to vested interests [58]. In doing so, man-

agers protect institutional legitimacy, i.e., the public perception

that the actions are proper and appropriate, rather than negligent

and irresponsible [61]. But these are challenging tasks because

the public that stands to gain from the project is not necessarily

the same that the project affects most [66]. How project man-

agers can use language to communicate effectively with external

stakeholders affected by the project so as to protect legitimacy

is the question at the heart of this study.

As a proxy for researching this question, this empirical study

examines in-depth verbal accounts produced throughout the in-

teraction between a senior project management team and repre-

sentatives of the local communities affected by the construction

works for a new airport terminal. The setting is the ?

4.2 billion

(2006 prices) Terminal 5 (T5) project at Heathrow, a private air-

port owned by British Airports Authority (BAA). The analysis

departs from Elsbach’s [22] work on how ?rms use accounts

(which encompass explanations, justi?cations, proclamations

of innocence, use of enhancements, and entitlements) so as to

protect institutional legitimacy. Elsbach identi?es two linguistic

forms to frame the accounts: acknowledgements and denials,

and two types of content to construct the accounts: references

to institutional and technical practices.

Somewhat surprisin

gly, the ?ndings reveal that “denials” [22]

and “silence” [32] when residents make claims are hardly an

option for the project management team. Rather, the acknowl-

edgement of the issues at the core of the claims emerges as an

0018-9391/$$26.00 ? 2009 IEEE

GIL: LANGUAGE AS A RESOURCE IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY AND A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

451

almost necessary condition to talk people into believing that the

project team is committed to mitigate the detrimental impacts of

the project. Managers appear to intentionally acknowledge the

issues even if they perceive that the claims have low legitimacy

in the sense that they may be factually incorrect, opportunistic,

or exaggerated. In light of this constraint, the ?ndings sug

-

gest that the tone of the acknowledgements, i.e., the attitude

conveyed through the choice of words and phrasing, becomes

critical to ?t the acknowledgments to the perceived legitimacy

of the claims and to the content available for constructing the

managers’ accounts. Gro

unded on the analysis of the empirical

?

ndings from this case study, this study proposes a conceptual

framework about the strategic use of language as a resource to

manage local communities and external stakeholders alike.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. First, the

work in communication for protecting legitimacy is discussed in

Section II. Then the research methods and setting are described

in Section III. Section IV analyses the verbal accounts, and

Section V discusses the ?ndings. Fin

ally, Section VI presents

the implications to practice and theory, and Section VII discusses

the limitations and opportunities for future research.

II. C

OMMUNICATION AND

L

EGITIMACY

: I

N

F

IRMS AND

P

ROJECTS

Organizations are eager to communicate to protect institu-

tional legitimacy, and maintain a positive reputation in the pub-

lic eye and in the eyes of the actors that can in?uence their

fate [59]. This is especially so for large ?rms, which are more

likely to be the target of institutional actors [18]. These actors,

such as media and interest groups, create coercive and normative

pressures for conformity to public expectations, as well as an

arena in which ?rms can build legitimacy [22]. Firms that fail to

meet expectations undermine their institutional legitimacy, and

compromise prospects of growth and existence due to lawsuits,

regulatory changes, and boycotts [25], [32].

Various studies have uncovered structures that ?rms create to

communicate and protect institutional legitimacy, namely work

in impression management (e.g., [22]), issues management (e.g.,

[10], [18], and [34]), public affairs (e.g., [32] and [53]), and

more recently, corporate communication [14]. The “boundary

spanning” role [45] of these structures is twofold. On the one

hand, they build bridges to help managers understand the outside

world, and learn how the ?rm can adapt so as to meet or exceed

regulatory requirements and conform to expectations [45]. On

the other hand, they work as a buffer that managers use to

insulate the ?rm from e

xternal interference, or to engage in

advocacy and advertising for in?uencing policy, regulation, and

sociopolitical expectations [45].

One stream of this literature focuses on the verbal accounts

that these structures produce to protect institutional legitimacy.

Elsbach’s [22] study of the accounts produced by the Califor

-

nia Cattle Industry reveals two broad linguistic framings and

two types of contents. Accounts can be framed as acknowl-

edgements or denials. A denial (“it did not happen”) attempts

to s

eparate the ?rm from the controversial event, whereas the

acknowledgement (“we recognize the negative event, but”) rec

-

ognizes it, but tries to attenuate negative perceptions. The ac-

knowledgements can be more effective to induce positive re-

actions because they seem less defensive and more concerned

with the public needs than the denials [41]. The content may

include references to technical or institutional practices. The

technical references stress ef?ciency and effectiveness in orga

-

nizational performance, conveying rationality and validity [22].

The institutional references to normative, and socially endorsed

practices and goals improve the credibility and believability of

the accounts. The institutional references can be more effective

than the technical ones because they provide evidence that the

?

rm is acting in a responsible, legitimate manner. Conversely,

the technical references can induce perceptions of self-serving

or uncaring feelings [22].

More recent studies have started to explore how the perfor-

mance of the ?rm is affected by the links between the verbal

accounts and its actions ex post. Scholars exhort ?rms to estab

-

lish routines, make resources available, and commit to embed

(in the ?rm) shared cognitive and linguistic maps of the r

el-

evant stakeholders [9], [55]. This approach can lead the ?rm

to move beyond “skilful public relations exercise and rhetoric

framing” [44] into engagement with the stakeholders in the

ways that are strategically desirable [4]. In particular, Erhard’s

et al.

[23] model de?nes integrity as “the state or condition of

being whole and complete.” In oversimpli?ed terms, integrity

for an individual or organization is about “honoring one’s word.”

This involves, ?rst, doing what you said you would do and by

the time you said you would do it; and second, as soon as you

know that you will not do it, saying that you will not do to those

who were counting on your word, and “clean up any mess”

caused by not keeping the word [23]. Erhard

et al.

[23] argue

that integrity is a factor of production that provides access to in-

creased performance and value creation. But, insightfully, they

also demonstrate that the application of cost

–bene?t analysis to

one’s integrity can cause out

-of-integrity and untrustworthy be-

havior. Bosse

et al.

[5] frame similar issues in terms of fairness:

people behave reciprocally by rewarding others whose actions

they deem fair, and by willingly incurring costs to punish those

they deem unfair.

A. Communication and Project Management

Communication is a behavioral competence for project man-

agement practice. Building on the experience of practitioners,

the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) Code of Profes

-

sional Conduct acknowledges that communication styles vary

according to the personality of the project manager. Still, it

highlights a set of principles for effective communication: listen

to the concerns of stakeholders, maintain professional integrity,

adhere to ethical standards, balance stakeholder interests, and

be aware of the emotional barriers (e.g., preconceived opinions

and beliefs, prejudices, biases, egos, and politics). Likewise,

Gadeken’s [26] experience

-

based re?ection on behavioral com

-

petences required for successful project managers spells out key

attributes relevant for effective communication:

1) Assertiveness: stating one’s own position forcefully in the

face of opposition from in?uential others.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 57, NO. 3, AUGUST 2010

2) Strategic in?uence: building coalitions with in?uential

others to overcome obstacles and obtain support.

3) Relationship development: spending time and energy get-

ting to know program sponsors, contractors, and other

in?uential people.

4) Political awareness: understand who the in?uential

players

are, what they want, and how to work with them.

Along the same lines, Pinto [50] encourages managers to de-

velop political acumen and persuasive skills so as to account

for the ubiquitous presence of politics and power imbalances in

projects. Communication is also part of the critical factors for

determining project success, namely, the abilities: to commu-

nicate what the issues are with affected constituencies, to deal

with the issues, and to sell the project output [51].

The literature on managing architecture

–

engineering

–

construction projects has also long established that effective

communication is central to high project performance [49], [62].

Extant studies are mostly descriptive, and focus on internal

communication between design and construction teams, and

between the project suppliers and the client. Building predomi-

nantly upon anecdotal evidence and exploratory surveys, these

studies reveal that on-site construction project managers may

spend up to nearly 80% of their workdays communicating ver-

bally [38]; and that interpersonal communication is critical to

crisis management [40] as well as to develop proper design

briefs [6].

Not surprisingly, communication skills also play an essential

role in developing relationships with local communities affected

by new infrastructure projects. In these settings, antagonistic vo-

cal minorities can create dif?culties, while the silent majority

may sit on the sidelines [66]. Using vignettes on projects to il-

lustrate the issues, but not as an empirical basis, Wideman [66]

exhorts managers to attend public meetings, produce commu-

nity information bulletins, and support talks with visual aids

and scale models. El-Diraby and Wang [21] develop a semantic

model to communicate to local communities (via an e-portal)

the environmental impacts of highway construction and miti-

gation measures. More strategically, Baker [3] discusses how

project managers may need to shift the communication pattern

occasionally, for example, from coalition building and listening

to counterattack and delaying tactics, but he does not elabo-

rate on the topic. Such shifts should not compromise, however,

on the principles of honesty, fairness, and integrity that should

underpin project relations [63], [67].

Clearly, the infrastructure project managers face the challenge

of developing a positive relationship with the local people. The

next section discusses how the T5 managers took on this chal-

lenge.

III. M

ETHODS AND

R

ESEARCH

B

ASE

The research method is a single-setting case study with mul-

tiple embedded units of analysis [69]. Case study research suits

well to examine “underexplored” topics [20]. This is exactly

the case of investigating how project management teams can

use language for protecting legitimacy. This method is also

appropriate because studies of how organizations deploy lan-

guage in the management of self

–

other relations must consider

the socio-organizational contingencies to generate meaningful

insights [56], [57]. The units of analysis are the pairs of resi-

de

nts’ claims and corresponding accounts produced by the T5

managers in the interaction with the residents. This approach

borrows from studies of talk-in- interaction, which consider lan-

guage a resource to coordinate social action [56], [57]. But the

focus

here is on the tones that project managers’ words and

phrasing convey.

The empirical setting

—

the T5 project at Heathrow airport

—

is relevant to studies on managing external stakeholders and

local communities in particular. As a monopolistic owner of the

three major London airports, BAA operated under the eye of the

public and regulator. Many people were frustrated that the gov-

ernment had approved T5 on the basis that the economic bene?ts

outweighed the environmental impacts. “T5 was not for the ben

-

e?t of the residents as illustrated by BAA”, a resident claimed. If

the T5 managers neglected the well being of the residents or the

environment during the construction works, they would offer an

argument to the oppositionists lobbying the regulator to call for

the government to break up the monopoly. Further, 90% of the

residents had opposed in a ballot against the government plans

(backed by BAA) to add a third runway to increase Heathrow

capacity. But while the local authorities had threatened to take

court action if these plans went forward, a government report

had concluded that there was a case for adding a third runway

if the environmental impacts could be reduced.

Notwithstanding this, as any public listed company, BAA

needed to balance the investments in social responsibility and the

environment with institutional pressure for economic ef?ciency

and pro?t generation. For the T5 senior managers, this meant

that they needed to balance the need to respond effectively to

the concerns of local residents with pressure to deliver T5 on

time, on budget, and ef?ciently. Next, the method to investigate

these issues is discussed.

A. Data Collection and Analysis

The ?eldwork lasted from mid

-2004 until mid-2007 as part

of a broader research program on managerial practices in large

infrastructure projects. At the heart of the empirical database for

this study are the minutes of 12 Local Focus meetings held be-

tween 2003 and 2005, and 27 meetings of the Heathrow Airport

Consultative Committee (HACC). The Local Focus meetings

were attended by the T5 senior managers and representatives of

the resident associations. The HACC meetings were attended by

the T5 senior managers, senior BAA corporate staff, and many

stakeholder groups, including local councils, resident associa-

tions, London assembly, and environmental groups. The HACC

minutes remain available online on a Web site run by the HACC.

The Local Focus minutes were available online on a Web site

run by BAA/T5 until 2008.

The author systematically read through the minutes to identify

the accounts that the managers reactively produced in response

to the claims raised by the residents, as well as the accounts that

the managers produced proactively in anticipation of foresee-

able claims. Thirty-two distinct claims are ide

nti?ed, each one

demanding that the project team would take actions to mitigate

GIL: LANGUAGE AS A RESOURCE IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY AND A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

453

TABLE I

I

NITIATIVES TO

G

AIN

C

OMMUNITY

S

UPPORT AND

M

EET THE

L

EGAL

O

BLIGATIONS

a different impact of the construction works, e.g., noise, traf?c

congestion, and air pollution. The predictability of the claims

given the large scale of T5 ?ts with Heugens

et al.

’s [35] descrip

-

tion of issues, i.e., gap

s between the stakeholder’s expectation

of the ?rm’s behavior and the stakeholder’s perception of the

actual behavior. The localized nature of the issues was unlikely

to have major impacts to the reputation of BAA. But if the man-

agers left the issues una

ttended, they could ?nd it dif?cult to

work cooperatively with residents, and consequently, with the

local authorities.

1

Fifty-

nine BAA accounts are also identi?ed, each consisting

of a sequence of conversational turns. In general, BAA managed

to produce one account that closed off the discussion around the

claim in the ?rst meeting after the meeting when the claim

surfaced. Five claims, however, generated up to ten accounts

each as the issues remained unresolved from one meeting to the

next. For these, time series were built in tabular form that traced

the sequence of the conversational turns.

As characteristic of qualitative studies [46], the coding effort

progressed iteratively after an exploratory exercise at the on-

set. This exercise was informed by a set of high-level codes: 1)

whether the BAA accounts were acknowledgements or denials;

and 2) whether the BAA accounts included technical and/or in-

stitutional references. For each claim, the author copied sections

of the accounts from the minutes, pasted the sections into sep-

arate tables, and compared the data with the codes. Although a

lack of denials in the BAA accounts was uncovered, differences

in the linguistic framing of the acknowledgements was sensed.

The data suggested that the T5 managers used systematically

1

A project community relations manager puts it “if residents are unhappy,

councils are unhappy” [47].

different words and phrasing to convey different attitudes when

acknowledging the issues. This led the autho

r to pursue a ?ne

-

grained analysis.

Speci?cally, the linguistic construction of the conversa

-

tional turns

—

the primary constituents of interaction [57]

—

that

formed the acknowledgements was looked at. The turns for

words and phrases that the T5 managers used to convey a spe-

ci?c verbal tone or attitude were examined. The matrices were

populated with the words and phrases to make sense of data, and

the turns that ?t with each potential tone were counted [37]. The

process was stopped when a saturation process set in the sense

the three broad tones that emerged

—

assertive, apologetic, and

caring

—

satisfactorily exhausted the data. The insights were

summarised in a conceptual framework on the use of language

to strategically communicate with local residents.

The issues of internal validity were handled by triangu-

lating the conceptual output against face-to-face interviews

and archival documents. Speci?cally, the insights were played

against: 1) the transcripts of interviews with the T5 senior man-

agers “focused” [43] on how they handled the residents’ claims;

2) relevant excerpts of the conversations that the author con-

ducted with over 70 T5 participants as part of the broader re-

search program; and (3) archival data, such as media interviews

with representatives of the local communities and BAA, clips

in the T5 press (

The Site

) and local press, and the content of the

Web sites of the local councils.

The scope of this study was re?ned through presentations

with practitioners and scholars. The reliability of the coding

was tested by, ?rst, engaging a graduate

-standing student in

coding the same material [60], and second, submitting drafts to

peer- reviewed conferences. The exemplars in Tables I

–

V, picked

from the ?nal matrices, illustrate the discussion that fol

lows.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 57, NO. 3, AUGUST 2010

TABLE II

S

AMPLE OF

C

LAIMS AND

A

NALYSIS OF THE

C

ONTENT AND

F

RAMING OF THE

M

ANAGERS

’ A

CCOUNTS

TABLE III

T

ONE OF

BAA A

CCOUNTS AS A

F

UNCTION OF

C

ONTENT AND

P

ERCEIVED

L

EGITIMACY OF THE

C

LAIM

IV. A

NALYSIS

A. T5 Project Context

In February 1993, BAA submitted the planning application

for T5, encompassing the construction of three concourses, a

4000-space car park, 13.5 km of tunnels, taxiways, and the

diversion of two rivers. At the peak of construction, BAA ex-

pected over 5000 workers to turn up daily on site. The gov-

ernment approved the planning application in 2001, noting “it

was right to rely on the assurances given by BAA to control the

widespread impacts of construction works to the environment.”

It also imposed 690 planning conditions, including restrictions

on working hours, no-go routes, parking provisions, control of

emissions, and noise barriers [33]. The construction of T5 started

in 2002 with a target to open in 2008. Table I summarizes the

initiatives that BAA launched to gain community support and

meet the planning conditions.

One group of initiatives focused on improving external com-

munication. They aimed to keep the local residents informed

about the construction works, and to allow them to express

concerns about the T5 activities, i.e., they aimed at short-term

cooperation [17]. This passed by writing progress updates in the

GIL: LANGUAGE AS A RESOURCE IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY AND A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

455

TABLE IV

E

XCERPTS OF THE

L

ONGITUDINAL

A

NALYSIS OF A

M

ONOTONIC

C

ONVERSATIONAL

S

EQUENCE

TABLE V

E

XCERPT OF THE

L

ONGITUDINAL

A

NALYSIS OF A

M

ULTITONIC

C

ONVERSATIONAL

S

EQUENCE

newsletter and using a double-decker bus to show around dis-

plays about T5. As put by the T5 community liaison manager

(2005), “Keeping people informed about what’s happening is

more than

half the battle in keeping them reasonably content

”

(emphasis added). These initiatives also helped the project team

to develop “moral imagination” [65] in the sense they could an

-

ticipate better the residents’ concerns and potential claims that

could be raised. The T5 community liaison manager explained

the following:

Initially, we had people complaining of dust in their windows, in

their washing, there was common anger that tends to escalate. In

those cases, we’d be out there meeting them very qui

ckly. That has a

huge effect to diffuse anger, avoid they call the local newspaper and

then we’d get an angry mob.

A second group of initiatives focused on the long- term re-

lationship between BAA and the local communities, i.e., they

aimed at long-

term collaboration [17]. Speci?cally, they aimed

to reinforce the relationship between BAA Heathrow and the

local communities in terms of employment. BAA expected the

T5 project to generate over 16 000 person-years of employment.

The BAA local labor strategy recognized that around Heathrow,

there were areas of deprivation, as well as a shortage of con-

struction workers [2]. A BAA economic development manager

(“typically a public sector job” in his own words) was respon

-

sible for implementing the strategy. BAA committed to invest

?

150 000 per annum from 2002 until 2012 to help the local

residents access employment opportunities at the T5 project.

But the economic development manager acknowledged that the