This study examines how Swedish forest industry firms assess capital investments by integrating financial and non-financial considerations. Based on in-depth interviews with senior managers from ten forest companies, this qualitative approach identifies a multidimensional evaluation approach that incorporates strategic, environmental, and social aspects alongside conventional financial metrics. The findings reveal that investment decisions are influenced not only by economic rationale but also by behavioral factors such as cognitive biases and perceived risk, providing empirical support for Prospect Theory in an industry-specific context. The study contributes to the literature by proposing an integrated capital investment assessment framework, highlighting the need for holistic, context-sensitive decision models in sectors with strong environmental and stakeholder interdependencies.

This paper examines how the management accounting control system functions while implementing strategy. We use the lens of institutional theory to understand how strategy and control processes are woven through a prominent international manufacturing organization. We show that the interplay between the formal and indigenous institution (e.g., Havenevik and Hårmar, 1999) steers strategy implementation as well as daily work. We introduce the concept of the indigenous institution as a lens to understand the flow of power and decisions through the company.

We find that both strategy implementation and daily work are directed by the indigenous institution, and maintained through communication of the intentions, or mission, of the formal institutions without significant specification of ways or means by the formal institution. It is, in effect, control through intention, or mission. 

Strategy implementation, which is usually understood to be an autonomous, or separate, activity, is in this case the content of a set of communications that flow through the indigenous institution and are filtered and transformed in such a way that the implemented strategy is not the same as the strategy prescribed by the formal institution. 

In this case, the indigenous institution is revealed to be in a long-term engagement with the issue of where control should be located for specific tasks and it introduced the concept of “position ownership” throughout the site as an unofficial operating strategy, even though the concept has no existence in the formal institution or formal strategy. 

This paper clarifies the boundaries between the formal institution of management documents and structure, and the realm of action, in which the indigenous institution dominates. The concept of the indigenous institutions reifies the underlying interactions of the participants in an understandable and useable way, revealing the durability and reflection jointly realized by participants. Adding this perspective to our way of understanding work gives us a way to understand the capacity of organizations to be both steady and flexible. It also provides a way to understand the difficulty of attempting to control change initiated by formal institutions. 

This paper examines how strategy implementation and daily work processes impact each other,and how strategy-related change occurs. We use the lens of institutional theory to understandhow strategy and control processes are woven through a prominent international manufacturingorganization. We show that the interplay between the formal and indigenous institution steers strategy implementation as well as daily work. We find that both strategy implementation and daily work are directed by the indigenous institution, and maintained through communication of the intentions, or mission, of the formal institutions without specification of ways or meansby the formal institution. It is control through intention, or mission. Strategy implementation,which is usually understood to be a separate, activity, is in this case a set of communications that flow through the indigenous institution and are filtered and transformed in such a way thatthe implemented strategy is not the same as the strategy prescribed by the formal institution.In this case, the indigenous institution is revealed to be in a long-term engagement with the issue of where control should be located, and it introduced the concept of “position ownership”as an unofficial operating strategy, even though the concept has no existence in the formal institution or formal strategy. This paper clarifies boundaries between the formal institution of management documents and structure, and the realm of action, in which the indigenous institution dominates. The concept of the indigenous institutions reifies the underlying interactions of the participants in an understandable and useable way, revealing the durabilityand reflection jointly realized by participants. Adding this perspective to our way ofunderstanding work gives us a way to understand the capacity of organizations to be both steady and flexible. It also provides a way to understand the difficulty of attempting to controlchange initiated by the formal institutions.

The purpose of this research is to gain understanding of how companies in the Swedish forest industry proceed in capital investment assessments regarding tangible investments. The research was conducted through a determination of which financial methods are used and which non-financial considerations (strategic, environmental, and social) are taken into account while assessing tangible investments. In order to enable a research of investment assessment in the Swedish forest industry, 10 companies have been studied with the use of qualitative (based on the interviews) method. The majority of the investment appraisal methods used in the Swedish forest companies have been observed in previous research, both domestically and internationally. The fact that the payback method is the most widely used method in the Swedish forest industry is in direct contrast to the application in the American forest industry, where discounted cash flows methods are most common. Net present value, internal rate of return, and sensitivity analysis are also used but not in all examined companies and not for all investments. Another distinctive finding is that the forest companies are happy to combine different calculation methods to increase the probability of succeeding in mapping a true picture of future investment financial consequences. The results of the study show that the investment assessment in the forest industry has several industry-specific features, which is expressed in the form of strategy, environmental, safety promotion becoming extra important for the forest companies, which stands out in relation to previous research.

In this paper we study the motives behind sustainability strategy implementation and how the performance measurement system (PMS) is modified during different development stages in a municipal organization. We use a case study approach and focus on one of the greenest municipalities in Europe, Växjö municipality in Sweden. With empirical results supporting the existence of several phases during the implementation process, our research offers two important contributions. First, it provides additional insight in the set of motives for the use of PMS during different development phases. Main stakeholders, politicians and managers of municipal departments and municipality owned companies, have revealed several “layers” of motives, which have shaped the development of the PMS. Second, the research also show that the PMS has a noticeable symbolic importance in promoting and communicating the green strategy to citizens and businesses in the region.

This study explores how Swedish manufacturing companies integrate sustainability into their product development process. We study the driving forces behind the decision to develop sustainability strategies and the factors that influence the integration of sustainability into product development. The primary conclusion is that the concept of sustainability has entered the Swedish business culture and become a normative part of the decision ecology to an extent greater than what is mandated by legal requirements. All the actors that we investigate in this study (owners, top managers, employees, suppliers, customers) appear to be pushing for enhanced sustainability. Nonetheless, the main, and most powerful, impetus is very clearly from top management or owners rather than the other actors. This is consistent with an evolving notion that sustainability in the environmental sense is now felt to be related to financial sustainability. Thus, the elite sectors of business (top managers and owners) appear to be imbuing their planning with additional aspects, such as sustainability, as the societal awareness of the connections between forms of sustainability develop. Additionally, we reveal differences based on organization size in terms of how they attempt to implement sustainable new product designs. Smaller companies tend to use more intuitive approaches while larger companies use more "standardized" and globally known "methods," in part because they may be more tightly connected with the global business knowledge ecosystems which tend to evolve and propagate "methods" or "tools."