Balancing the Boundaries in Banking: The Role of Business Models and Boundaries in Sustainability Work

This dissertation explores how sustainability shapes the boundaries of banking business models by examining organizational boundaries, boundary activities, and sustainable business models. While banks are increasingly subject to regulatory and societal pressures to contribute to sustainability agendas, sustainability integration often remains fragmented and peripheral. Addressing this challenge, the dissertation adopts a boundary-based perspective to examine how sustainability work unfolds within and across banking business model boundaries. Grounded in a qualitative research design, the dissertation draws on cases in the Nordic banking sector, combining a multiple-case study with an in-depth single-case study of four Nordic banks. The dissertation’s empirical foundation is based on 46 semi-structured interviews and secondary data in the form of regulatory frameworks, annual and sustainability reports. The dissertation is article-based and includes 3 research articles. The three articles collectively engage with and connect three literature streams: Sustainable business models, organizational boundaries, and sustainability work. Article 1 reviews and synthesizes how organizational boundaries are used to study sustainable business models. Article 2 examines how boundary work unfolds within banking business models in response to sustainability pressures. Article 3 explores the role of key stakeholders as boundary spanners in advancing sustainability work. Building on these insights, the dissertation advances a key theoretical contribution by conceptualizing sustainable business models as organizational boundary arrangements, structured around four interrelated value pillars: value proposition, value creation, value delivery, and value capture. From this perspective, sustainability work and integration depend on how these boundaries are configured, maintained, or expanded, through the boundary work and boundary-spanning enacted by organizational stakeholders. The dissertation further highlights that sustainability work is inherently integrative and indivisible, meaning that it cannot be meaningfully separated into isolated roles, units, or functions without undermining its effectiveness. By advancing a boundary-based understanding of sustainable business models and sustainability work, this dissertation contributes to research on sustainable business models and organizational boundaries by showing how sustainability work and integration is shaped through the configuration, maintenance, and reworking of organizational boundaries across business models. Across the three articles, the dissertation offers a relational account of sustainability work and implies that for sustainability work to lead to sustainability integration in banking organizations, it requires ongoing boundary work, boundary spanning, and stakeholder interaction, along with change in norms and values. In doing so, it highlights sustainability integration as a collective, boundary-crossing process rather than a singular strategic decision.