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."

This paper reports on the nature of dispersed and integrative practices (Schatzki, 1996) in collaborative work. Working in collaboration is becoming more common across organizations and a research topic across domains. We use the situation of changes in the use of collaboration to investigate the dispersed-integrative concept using in-depth interviews and observations in organizations employing the same high collaboration work method (Lean Production, LP).

We show that it was the introduction of collaborative work that was followed by the binding of the dispersed practice with the integrative practice to form a new integrative practice containing the social component.  This result has implications for research and for practice. In general, it supports the importance of the practice theory lens in study of organizations as a generator of novel insight. It also moves practice theory forward by developing theory about changes in dispersed and integrative practices and their relation to each other.

An unprecedented number of large ice hockey arenas were built in Sweden between 2000-2014. This study explores the motives and rationale behind these capital investments in Swedish ice hockey arenas. Based on a multiple data gathering methods, this research conclude that capital investments in sport arenas are primarily driven by the need for rationalization and improvement of events, increasing societal image building through sport and an increasing focus on social enrichment in the competition for attracting citizens and companies to municipalities. Close collaborations between local politicians, club executives and entrepreneurs have provided creative financial solutions for the new arenas. The ice hockey arena projects have been legitimized from a societal perspective through either overly optimistic or manipulated sophisticated capital investment methods, which provided the necessary support for the political decision rationale that has been dominating these projects. A consequence of the arena projects, is an increased commercialization and professionalization of Swedish hockey.