Institutional Pressures and Interpretive Divergence : Opportunity, Risk, and Swedish Wooden Furniture SME Sensemaking Under the ESPR

Sammanfattning

The Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and its Digital Product Passport (DPP) introduce mandatory product-level sustainability requirements for European producers. SMEs in the Swedish wooden furniture sector sit inside this scope, but are less structurally prepared for the documentation, traceability, and digital infrastructure the DPP will require. The literature shows that SMEs facing the same regulatory change respond differently, but the mechanism behind that variation has not yet been identified. This thesis explores how Swedish wooden furniture SMEs interpret and respond to the ESPR and the DPP, and why companies in similar environments perceive the same regulation as primarily an opportunity for some, and primarily a risk for others. An interpretivist, abductive, multiple case study design is applied across six firms, with semi-structured interviews used alongside secondary documents. The data is read through a conceptual framework that combines institutional theory, external enablement, regulatory sensemaking, and opportunity recognition with the rational-action, social-constructionist, and mediated-conflict strands of neoinstitutionalism (RAN, SCN, MCN) applied as analytical lenses. The cases divide into an opportunity-dominant cluster (Companies B, D, and E) and a risk-dominant cluster (Companies A, C, and F). Shared conditions of institutional uncertainty, resource asymmetry, a facility-to-product compliance shift, a dormant buyer channel, and competitive inequality are all interpreted by leadership and organisational culture, which acts as a sorting factor across the firms. Opportunity recognition is conditional rather than absent across the cases, with five of six firms perceiving the regulation as potentially enabling, and with Company E perceiving it as strictly enabling. The thesis contributes a firm-level explanation for variation in SME regulatory responses, complementing institutional theory’s broader account of how external pressures shape organisations, further refining how normative commitment, leadership, and culture are understood within the regulatory sensemaking process.