Doing sustainability work in SMEs- Setting new standards, maintaining others’ - or navigating a middle way?

Abstract

Sustainability work is nowadays high on the agenda for businesses to deal with, and practices for how to enact sustainability have been established and institutionalized over time. However, larger companies have set the agenda for this debate, putting small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) in the shadows. As SMEs stand for a large part of the world’s business and hence have a large potential impact through their actions, they deserve more attention in the sustainability work discourse. This multiple case study investigates how sustainability work is enacted by 10 Swedish SMEs saying that they do sustainability work. Applying the theoretical perspective of institutional work, their stories covering everyday activities and operations in sustainability work are understood as examples of institutional entrepreneurs, caretakers and troublemakers in their intentional work to create, maintain or disrupt institutionalized ways of working with sustainability. A potential benefit of being within the paradox of embedded agency is identified and discussed, where SMEs can navigate a middle way where they do institutional work in different directions simultaneously in separate aspects of their sustainability work. This study’s contributions for practitioners and SME sustainability research are the many examples of how sustainability work can be done intentionally in different ways and combinations of ways. Contribution for institutional work research is that multidimensional institutional work, done in multiple institutional roles simultaneously, can be a way of navigating a landscape of institutionalized practices.