Objective: In this thesis, we assume that the organizations' interests are governing their behavior/positions. It seems possible to draw conclusions about organizations'interests on the basis of the behavior / positions that will appear in the givenopinions on Swedish Public Investigations. The purpose of this thesis is toidentify self-interests of the studied organizations as they appear in their givenopinions.

Method: The authors have made a qualitative and quantitative study of the opinions.

Theoretical perspective: The basis of the study is the organization theories that focus the self-interest oforganizations.

Empiric: Information is taken from four Swedish Public Investigations: the New Company Act, International Accounting for Swedish companies, Abolition of the audit requirement for small and medium sized enterprise and Simplified accounting. Altogether 310 opinions have been given on these, out of which we have studied 59. Furthermore, we have collected information on tasks, activities and objectives from the websites of the opinion giving organizations.

Conclusions: In the literature, we found, as mentioned, that organizations havet hree self- interests which we define as general self-interests. They are the interest in survival, resources and power. We have found - what we believe – an additional general self-interest of organizations, namely the interest to avoid accountability and transparency. It was possible to divide the organizations intogroups with high community of interest within each group while the community between the groups was low. This provides an empirical support to Dimaggio’s and Powell’s theory which says that organizations in specific areas are similar. This means that it is possible to study the interest of organizations, without studying the individuals in an organization. We found that the owner's interests expressed in tasks, activities and objectives of the organization are important factors affecting the organization's interest structure. We also found indications - however unclear - that the public interest has an impact on the organizations' self interests. We also found an interest to protect its own market which can be related to the general interest of resource influx under Pfeffers and Salanciks theories of resource dependence.