Abstract:

Although communities have emerged, in contemporary theories, as intricate groups of heterogeneous actors, organizations and resources, we still know little about the interplay between the entirety of the community components and its impact on the communal support of siting decisions. The paper addresses this gap by contesting boundaries between literatures on consumption communities and social acceptance and by drawing on the networked view of communities that will capture the nuances and whole process at play in these kind complex groupings. Findings, derived from a hermeneutical approach of data analysis, show that community acceptance can prevail when the heterogeneous nature of communities is entwined with resource dependency. More specifically we demonstrated that even though heterogeneity can be as a destabilizing force, the benefits and motivations associated with social, economic and informational resource flows incites heterogeneous actors to act in mutually supportive ways and places them in interdependent positions.Implications are drawn for project managers in terms of behavior change tools.