Strengthening and encouraging women everywhere - A Nordic fashion company’s social sustainability vision
Abstract
As time passes, sustainability concerns have increasingly moved up the corporate agenda,
making it ‘the talk of the town’ within corporations all over the world. While there is extensive
conceptual literature on how companies should or do integrate sustainability into strategy, there
is still a lack of empirical studies on how this is done in practice, especially in relation to social
issues in comparison to environmental ones. To address this gap within research, the following
research question was chosen: How do companies attempt to integrate social sustainability
issues into their strategy? This study draws on a qualitative case study of a Nordic fashion
company’s attempt to integrate a social sustainability issue, by conforming its corporate vision
to a women empowerment norm, claiming that its vision is to “strengthen and encourage
women everywhere”. Based on legitimacy theory, this study shows that a Nordic fashion
company’s launch of their social sustainable vision can be seen as a way for this company to
integrate, in their main markets, a desirable societal idea of women empowerment into their
strategy, arguably increasing their legitimacy. Thus, indicating that it, through legitimacy,
attempts to integrate such an idea into their strategy. However, this study also shows that both
internal and external actors claim there to be discrepancies between the vision and current
corporate practices. This study shows a new perspective when integrating issues such as social
sustainability, compared to environmental ones, into the company strategy, indicating that
more research is needed on the subject. Further suggesting that challenges arising from such
attempts, particularly regarding legitimacy, deserves more attention, including a more
extensive focus on the perspectives of customers’ as well as the employees’. Finally, this study
also contributes with insights regarding how companies comply with a desirable social idea
through an extensive corporate vision. Highlighting the need to carry out the integration on a
much broader scale than what the literature has seen before as it bears to cover all levels of the
company’s strategy and its practices.
Degree
Master 2-years
Other description
McS in Mangagement
Collections
View/ Open
Date
2022-06-21Author
Erlandsson, Emmie
Lidal, Josefin
Keywords
Sustainability
Social sustainability
Social sustainability vision
Sustainability integration
Strategy formation
Legitimacy theory
Legitimacy
Gender equality
Women empowerment
Women empowerment norm
Profitability norm
Series/Report no.
2022:137
Language
eng
Metadata
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