Abstract

Despite growing attention to sustainability, organizations still face practical challenges in translating broad ambitions into everyday work, decisions, and routines. This thesis examines how Corporate Sustainability Managers (CSMs) in Sweden perceive and interpret their professional roles, and which organizational factors they see as enabling or constraining the implementation of Proactive Environmental Strategies (PES). The study is based on six semi-structured interviews with CSMs in Swedish organizations and follows a qualitative design using the Gioia methodology. The analysis is guided by a theoretical framework combining the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV), Proactive Environmental Strategy (PES), Upper Echelons Theory (UET), and the Attention-Based View (ABV). This enables an examination of how sustainability is interpreted, prioritized, and enacted within organizations, and how CSM agency is shaped by both individual and structural conditions. The findings show that CSMs interpret their role as hybrid, relational, and increasingly strategic, rather than purely technical or reporting. They describe themselves as translators, coordinators, and credibility-builders who connect sustainability goals to everyday organizational practices. The findings also show that their perceived ability to implement PES depends on leadership attention, strategic integration, organizational structures, and access to credible data systems. While CSMs are motivated to advance sustainability, their influence remains conditional on whether sustainability is given sufficient organizational visibility and legitimacy. The thesis contributes theoretically by reconceptualizing UET from a top-management lens to an interpretive-agency lens at the middle-management level, while also extending the ABV to explain how sustainability gains or loses organizational visibility. Practically, the study suggests that organizations need to position CSMs close to decision-making, support cross-functional collaboration, and invest in credible data systems if sustainability is to move beyond compliance and become strategically meaningful.