Abstract:The objective of this paper is to examine the organization renewal process in forest owners' associations and the role of members in this process. Based on 15 qualitative interviews with district council members in a forest owners' association, we describe the characteristics of today's elected member representatives in terms of their motives for volunteering, their relationship with the organization, and the organizational practices and routines of the renewal process. It is shown that most district council members are traditional forest owners with a family history within the association and that the district councils are therefore not representative of all member groups. We thus argue that it will be important for the renewal process that the associations carefully consider how they want to be perceived by both current and potential members in order to encourage the involvement of different owner groups. The election committees, which prepare the elections to the councils and board, play an important role in the associations' renewal processes and must become more active in their search for suitable candidates.

Forestry contractors have doubled their share of work in Swedish forests since the 1990s and have thus become important actors in the industry's supply chain. Yet, their profitability has often been low. It is essential for a firm's success to have a well-functioning business model. Therefore, the aim of this study was to characterize business models currently used by forestry contractors and identify differences in the contractors' financial performance in relation to a chosen business model. A survey was sent to all limited liability companies in northern Sweden that were registered to carry out logging or silviculture. One hundred and ninety-eight contractors responded, and their financial performance was analysed based on information in financial statements. The study highlights that there are clear differences both within and between contractor categories in relation to several business model components, as well as their financial performance. Logging contractors had the lowest profitability, measured as return on assets, and also a lower solidity and liquidity compared to silvicultural and mixed service contractors. The largest logging contractors tended to have a better and more stable profitability than small ones, although the differences were small and varied between years. However, a negative trend in profitability was identified for all contractor groups.

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Forestry service contractors' performance have been found related to how they organize their business. For benchmarking purposes, it is thus of vital importance to have a tool that can capture the relevant characteristics of a firm's business model and structure the information in a useful way. The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a well-established tool that has frequently been used to describe business models in other industries than forestry. Thus, the aim of this paper was to identify which of the BMC components are the most relevant when comparing business models applied by forestry service contractors and provide a framework for characterizing their business models in a structured and comparable manner. The research process also identified which questions are critical to capturing the relevant content of the included business model components. The adapted framework was tested by interviewing forestry service market experts in Sweden, Finland, Scotland and Ireland about the business model characteristics in their respective countries. The result was a seven-component BMC framework with a number of key questions associated to each component. The paper concludes that the proposed canvas framework is a structured and practical approach for characterizing business models applied by forestry service contractors.

Long-term relationships with family forest owners willing to sell roundwood are important for the Nordic forest industry. Research has shown that customer loyalty is mediated by a sense of commitment to the service provider. At least two forms of commitment have been distinguished: affective commitment in the sense of liking the provider, and calculative commitment in the sense of being dependent on the provider. In Sweden, more than one-third of family forest owners are members of a forest owners' association with the primary objective of supporting its members' profitability. The associations buy one-third of the owners' roundwood. This study examined the role of different forms of commitment in the process of becoming loyal timber suppliers, and the moderating role of membership. A questionnaire was sent to forest owners who notified the authorities of a final harvesting operation involving timber procurement by an organization. The results show that both forms of commitment significantly affected loyalty and the forms were correlated. Members of forest owners' associations who sold their timber to the association expressed higher affective commitment and loyalty than other forest owners, indicating that a sense of member involvement is important for timber procurement by the associations.