The stakeholders of social projects: a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis

Frame of the research. The socioeconomic, political, and health shocks have had a considerable impact on different stakeholders, such as firms, households, police making, and public administrations. It is crucial to assess the effectiveness of sustainable practices and understand the outcomes they generate for the communities. Purpose of the paper. The aim of this study is to understand the state of art about the topic of stakeholders of social projects in management research, the key research streams related to this subject area and the trends and possible future studies Methodology. To achieve this goal, we conducted a literature review starting from SCOPUS and WOS database and two types of bibliometric analysis, the Keyword Co-occurrence Analysis and the Bibliographic Coupling Analysis. Keyword Co-occurrence Analysis using VOS viewer software Results. We highlight the trends of publications by years, the geographic distribution of the literature, the main journal, cited authors and cited articles. Moreover, the study identifies the recurring keywords and nine clusters of 74 papers. Research limitations. The clusters created by VOSviewer excluded 27 articles not connected with other papers under review. This implies the loss of part of the existing literature. Furthermore, the analysis was carried out only in English-language and open access articles. Managerial implications. The paper suggests some practical implications: advocate for an integrated stakeholder management approach, emphasize collaborative partnerships, ethical supply chain practices, and effective communication, and encourage continuous learning and capacity building for impactful social projects. Originality of the paper. To date, there are no managerial studies that provided a literature review about the topic of stakeholders of social projects.