Being Green and Global - : A qualitative study of sustainable Swedish fashion companies and their environmental work connected to internationalization

Sammanfattning: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study addressing the theoretical gap regarding environmental sustainability and strategic decision making of internationalization, with focus on the choices of when, where and how. This is achieved by evaluating how Swedish sustainable fashion companies connect environmental sustainability and internationalization. In order to do this, the study also concerns the companies work with both environmental sustainability and internationalization in isolation. By this empirical contributions, the thesis starts to develop a framework in the new area of theory. This research uses a qualitative method and employ multiple case studies, where the data was collected through interviews with seven Swedish fashion companies. The results show that none of the case companies formally connected environmental sustainability in their strategic decisions regarding; when, where and how to internationalize. The findings further show that none of the case companies are neither systematic or strategic in their work. Although, all case companies are in the forefront of environmental sustainability, which permeates the entire company, and it can therefore be argued that it in some sense reflects on the strategic decisions. The study therefore addresses actions that companies aiming to be sustainable can integrate in their internationalization.