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To assess the speed and directionality of low-carbon transition processes in the UK steel industry, this article makes a longitudinal analysis of changing external pressures and company response strategies over the last 34 years. Using the Triple Embeddedness Framework and a five-phase model of reorientation, the study finds that the steel industry's low-carbon reorientation strategies moved from inaction (phase 1 in our model) and incremental change (phase 2) in the 1988–1997 period, to hedging and exploration of technical alternatives (phase 3) in the 1997–2007 period, back to incremental change in the 2007–2015 period (phase 2), and then forward again to hedging and exploration of technical alternatives (phase 3) in the 2015–2022 period. The reason for this oscillation pattern is that economic decline and successive retrenchment strategies reduced managerial attention and organizational resources for …