From Sustainability Ambition to Engineering Practice: A Cross-Case Study of Sustainability Integration in Engineering-Intensive Firms

Engineering firms are central to the green transition, yet sustainability ambition does not automatically translate into organisational practice or wider transition outcomes. This article presents a structured synthesis of five coordinated studies covering Scania (two complementary studies), ABB, Siemens and a cross-organisational survey. Documentary, interview, employee-project and survey evidence indicates that sustainability integration differs between strategic and operational settings; that individual sustainability competency can coexist with organisational barriers to implementation; and that customer, infrastructure and market conditions can constrain outcomes beyond firms’ direct control. We distinguish these observed cross-level mismatches from a theoretically derived shifting-constraint proposition: when capability in one domain improves, a constraint elsewhere may become relatively more important for the next increment of progress. The contribution is a contingent, three-domain diagnostic linking individual competency, organisational alignment and external system alignment, with propositions for longitudinal testing. The findings suggest that sustainability interventions should target the level at which the current constraint resides.