Background: Sustainability is realized by companies to different extends as plenty of pressures operate on projects which influence the outcome. One specific influence are the actors who make sense of the pressures based on organizational and personal experiences. By the combination of institutional logics and organizational sensemaking theory, organizational influences in form of pressures and logics (forming the macro-level) and personal views based on individual sense making (micro-level) are combined to a micro-macro connection. The integration of the both theories leads to a deeper understanding on ‘sustainability integration’. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to understand how individuals handle sustainability in a project in a multinational company with has a focus in sustainability. It is of most interest how the influences, represented by the concept of institutional logics, are constructed by the sensemaking of the actors. Research question: How do employees make sense of a project with a sustainability purpose based on institutional logics? Method: The research design of this thesis is an exploratory case study with data collection by the hands of semi-structured interviews. Abductive reasoning was applied. An epistemological position of constructivism and interpretivism was taken. Conclusion: The findings of this study show that organizational pressures are not explicitly noted by each individual. A collective sensemaking is found in the fact that a sustainable project must be affordable for the customers to meet their needs. This finding however, can be traced back to the organizational level which is coined by a strong value culture.

It is currently popular to study management accounting (MA) from an institutionalist perspective. Such a perspective is premised on that ‘institutions matter’; so that notions of social structure, agency and linkages in between them thus become central. While readings of the institutionally oriented MA-literature reveals interesting and insightful contributions about MA, they also unearth concerns regarding diversity and fragmentation in conceptualization and modelling. Therefore, the purpose of this licentiate thesis is to identify, classify and synthesize how ‘institutions matter’ in extant MA research and, based on this, suggest avenues for future research. To do so, this licentiate thesis entails a review of 34 empirical institutionally oriented MA studies. The findings entail ‘answers’ to 4 particular review questions regarding current (1) Conceptualizations of MA, (2) Overall explanatory models of agency, (3) Social roles of MA and, (4) Sources of MA practice – questions which are all derived from what I refer to as ‘A Basic Model of institutional theorizing (ABM)’. Overall, this review provides maps which are previously not pursued for this literature for the areas of each respective review question. Within such broader achievements, it identifies five ontological approaches to a relationship between social structure and agency instead of the established three. It also adds four social roles of MA previously not discussed for this literature. Finally, it suggests a uniform set of ‘sources of MA practice’ unlike the current literature that typically separates sources of continuity, change, homogeneity or heterogeneity respectively. The thesis concludes with a discussion of key findings and contributions, based on which a number of avenues for future institutionalist conceptualization and modelling of MA are suggested.

Since the early 1990s, institutional approaches to organizations have increasingly focused on explaining the role of agency in processes of institutional creation and transformation. The paradox of embedded agency, the question of how actors can become motivated and enabled to transform supposedly taken-for-granted practices, structures and norms has become the fundamental puzzle of contemporary institutional theory. Recent attempts to resolve this puzzle under the label of “institutional work” focus on practices aimed at creating, maintaining, and disrupting institutions, but portray them as planned, discrete episodes that unfold in isolation from everyday organizational or social life. Thereby, the label highlights institutionalists’ current neglect of work in its literal meaning as actors’ everyday occupational tasks and activities. The detachment of institutional work from practical work constitutes a significant blind spot in institutionalists’ understanding of agency and calls for research that examines the reciprocity of institutions and work. Drawing on illuminating constructs from theories of practice, this study extends existing field-level approaches to the paradox of embedded agency. It argues for a practice-based institutionalism that focuses on individual actors and the role of their collective micro-level praxis in constituting macro-level institutions. It re-connects institutional arguments to every-day activity rather than organizational or managerial action, unpacks the micro-practices and micro–politics by which actors negotiate institutional contradictions and demonstrates the reciprocity of institutions and work. The research addresses the detachment of institutional and practical work through a single-case study of a global law firm’s banking group. It explores what banking lawyers do when they ‘do deals’ and how their practical work may attain institutional relevance. Positioned at the intersec-tion of local laws, international financial markets, commercial and professional logics, banking lawyers operate across multiple institutional frameworks. Observations and accounts of their work provide particularly rich insights into the dynamics of institutional persistence and change, because they illustrate empirically how contradictory institutionalized concepts, practices and logics are experienced, negotiated, and constituted at work.