From Strategy to Practice: Organisational Member Sensemaking and Enactment of Sustainability at Company X’s Swedish Manufacturing Site

Abstract

Sustainability now plays a major role in how organisations operate. However, its meaning within organisations tends to remain open, uneven, and shaped by context. Existing research has generated important insights into sustainability strategy, managerial framing, and stakeholder pressures, but it has given less attention to how organisational members themselves understand sustainability in the course of their daily work. This gap is relevant in high-risk industrial environments, where sustainability is closely tied to safety, compliance, operational continuity, and local working practices. The thesis uses organisational sensemaking and sensegiving as its main theoretical lens to analyse how organisational members interpret sustainability and how these interpretations are shaped by organisational context.

This thesis examines how organisational members at the Swedish manufacturing site of Company X make sense of sustainability in their everyday work, with attention to the organisational context that shapes these interpretations. The study explores how sustainability is interpreted and enacted in everyday work and considers how systems, structures, leadership, communication practices, and workplace culture influence that process.

The study was conducted as a qualitatively driven single-case study, based on nine semistructured interviews with team members, supervisors, and managers at the Swedish manufacturing site. To support and contextualise the qualitative analysis, two additional survey sources were included: a site-level sustainability survey and the 2023 Global Employee Engagement Survey of the company. Interview data were analysed inductively through qualitative content analysis informed by an organisational sensemaking framework, whereas the survey material was used to contextualise and reinforce the interpretive patterns emerging from the interviews.

The findings show that organisational members did not share a single uniform understanding of sustainability but interpreted it through several overlapping meanings tied to their work responsibilities, including responsible continuity, technical and operational pragmatism, human and safety-centred care, and ethical or generational responsibility. Sustainability became more meaningful when organisational members could connect it to the realities of their own work, with organisational context playing a strong role in shaping how these interpretations were maintained and translated into practice. Formal systems such as procedures, training, reporting, and documentation made sustainability visible across the site, although they often clarified expectations more than they enabled action. Engagement was strengthened by leadership visibility, local communication, team-level dialogue, and cross-functional coordination, while workload pressures, fragmented coordination, limited time, and weak connections between corporate ambitions and local realities constrained sustained action.

This thesis contributes to the literature on sustainability and organisational sensemaking by bringing organisational member interpretation and enactment to the centre of the analysis, showing how sustainability takes shape through everyday organisational experience, local sensemaking, and the practical conditions that support or limit action. It also offers practical insight for high-risk industrial organisations seeking to strengthen the connection between corporate sustainability ambitions and operational practice in everyday organisational life.