Företagets agerande i förhållande till naturbelastningen: Hur företaget möter myndigheternas miljökrav

This study primarily focuses on the ways in which companies choose to adapt themselves to the demands of the authorities as based on the Swedish environmental protection act. The time during which the burden upon nature became a serious, important question for companies is a very dramatic phase of a historical process. Before the arrival of more comprehensive legislation, no loads upon nature were discussed within companies as problems. Companies were uninterested and passive in relation to such problems. Not before the authorities began to stipulate requirements based on the environmental protection act did the burden upon nature assume serious importance within companies. What is focused upon in this study is how things unfold when companies encounter demands from the public authorities in the area of environment. In order to shed light on this, a process of transformation is studied in two industrial companies: how the authorities demands become manifested in the companies, how new rules emerge in the process of negotiation between the companies and the authorities, and how the rules have their effect within the companies. What is studied is an institutional transformation process. The aim of the study is to describe the process by which the burden upon nature is socially constructed through a negotiation process between the company and the authorities, to identify the rules which determine the social construction of nature inside the company, and also to describe how these rules affect the social construction of nature.