The purpose of this study was to explore how nursing home managers relate to sexual needs of the elderly in the nursing homes. The empirical data consists of a vignette study followed by interviews with three nursing home managers. The aim was to involve six managers in our study but due to a major loss of respondents, we chose to complete our data collection with a review of the values which the elderly care is committed to follow by law. The major results of our empirical data suggest that sexual needs are not seen as an important issue in the daily care of the elderly. Even though the nursing home managers agreed on sexuality being an important need for the elderly, they only deal with the issue if the sexual need becomes a problem. Our results were analyzed with a perspective of new institutional organization theory. One conclusion from the analysis is that the nursing home managers way of relating to the sexual needs of the elderly, is closely linked to society norms and values surrounding their organizations. Our study also shows that the organizations are depending on legitimacy from the environment to maintain being entitled to needed society resources. To obtain this legitimacy, the nursing home managers are forced to meet the sexual needs of the elderly in accordance to how the environment expects them to work with elderly sexuality
