Spänningar och strategier vid upprättande av hållbarhetsredovisningen : En fallstudie av ett stort familjeägt företag

The introduction of the law about sustainability reporting has made it necessary for larger companies to report on sustainability. This contributes to companies now having to restructure their annual reports to include areas such as the environment and human rights. When companies start to report sustainability, different types of tension are likely to arise, depending on how much the company has worked with sustainability in the past. Tensions meaning different interests or goals that clash between areas of social conditions, the environment and the economy. The purpose of this paper is to identify tensions that may arise and how they are handled when a company is required to include sustainability in their annual reports. With this paper, we want to increase the understanding of the challenges that may arise in the preparation of sustainability reports, which can facilitate other companies that are in a similar situation to handle them better. To answer the purpose, a case study has been carried out. Furthermore, a qualitative method is used to investigate the company Martinson, a large timber company in Västerbotten. The company's sustainability report has been analyzed and four people have been interviewed, three of whom work with Martinson's sustainability report. The interview was based on a framework that deals with tensions and how they are handled using different strategies (Hahn et al., 2014). In the analysis we were able to identify that tensions were often limited to the short-term orientation rather than long-term. We could also see that the company often adopted an acceptance strategy to combat these tensions