| Summary: | The concept sustainable development is something that has recently received much attention in organizations, media and popularly. The energy sector represents a significant part of the worlds total carbon dioxide emission and has a crucial role to solve the issues of how sustainability should proceed. The purpose of the study is to increase the comprehension of institutional mechanism’s impact on sustainable work in the energy sector with focus on organizations signaling and risk management. Institutional theory has been used to study how and why companies in the energy sector act as they do. The study is executed with a qualitative method with 15 respondents in four companies that operate in northern Sweden. The respondents are senior decision makers in the energy sector that fully or partly works with developing their organization’s sustainability work. To encode the impact of institutional mechanisms, the respondents have answered how the risk management process and signaling of sustainability is performed in their organization. Our results indicate differences in how both risk management and signaling of sustainability is performed whether it is financial, environmental or social sustainability work. This study also shows that the regulatory pillar has a major impact on all the energy sector’s sustainability efforts. Environmental sustainability has proved strongly related with the normative pillar and social sustainability with the cognitive pillar. Obtaining competitive advantage is strongly related with the energy sector's sustainability efforts. It would therefore be useful in future research to study similar approach from within a stakeholder perspective, while using the resource-based theory. Validerat; 20150616 (global_studentproject_submitter)
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