Project Temporalities: How Frogs Can Become Stakeholders

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how animals can become stakeholders in interaction with project management technologies and what happens with project temporalities when new and surprising stakeholders become part of a project and a recognized matter of concern to be taken into account.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a qualitative case study of a project in the building industry. The authors use actor-network theory (ANT) to analyze the emergence of animal stakeholders, stakes and temporalities.

Findings – The study shows how project temporalities can multiply in interaction with project management technologies and how conventional linear conceptions of project time may be contested with the emergence of new non-human stakeholders and temporalities.

Research limitations/implications – The study draws on ANT to show how animals can become stakeholders during the project. Other approaches to animal stakeholders may provide other valuable insights.

Practical implications – Rather than taking the linear time conception for granted, the management challenge and practical implication is to re-conceptualize time by taking heterogeneous temporalities into account. This may require investments in new project management technologies.

Originality/value – This paper adds to the literatures on project temporalities and stakeholder theory by connecting them to the question of non-human stakeholders and to project management technologies.