Legitimacy Without Convergence

Sammanfattning

This study examines how sustainability, as a legitimate but ambiguous institutional expectation, is interpreted and enacted within a Swedish business school. Based on seventeen semi-structured interviews with students, faculty, program directors, and other academic actors, the thesis adopts an abductive qualitative case study design informed by neo-institutional theory, sensemaking, and loose coupling. The findings show that sustainability is highly visible at the institutional level through strategy, accreditation, mission statements, and program framing, yet its educational meaning remains unsettled. Participants generally treated sustainability as expected and legitimate, but they attached different meanings to it depending on role, discipline, and position. Faculty often framed sustainability through reformist, instrumental, or critical orientations; program leaders emphasized legitimacy and coherence; and students described sustainability as unevenly encountered, often talked about more than taught. In practice, sustainability was enacted through dedicated spaces, additive incorporation into existing courses, and person-dependent initiatives rather than through a fully shared curriculum logic. The study argues that this unevenness is not simply a problem of implementation but the result of legitimacy without convergence: a formal institutional commitment that is interpreted through role-based sensemaking within a loosely coupled academic organization. By combining institutional theory with sensemaking, the thesis explains why sustainability can be sincerely valued, publicly visible, and still unevenly embedded in business education.