Business adopted a terminology of sustainability to defend, then justify, and finally explain practices that acknowledged resource limitations as inherent in the business environment. Tracing the rhetoric across a half century of business use demonstrates an expansion of the concept of sustainability to encompass managerial attention to finite human, capital, and political resources. A rhetoric of sustainability seemed to promise a revolution in management practice, and practitioners have indeed adopted principles of complex systems. The sustainability terminology retains its narrower focus on environmentally responsible corporate activities, however, and management communication pedagogy has not yet recognized the emerging discourse of adaptive communication practices.

业务采用可持续性的术语来捍卫，辩护并最终解释那些承认资源限制是业务环境中固有的做法。在半个世纪的业务使用中追溯这些言论，表明了可持续性概念的扩展，涵盖了管理人员对有限的人力，资本和政治资源的关注。可持续性的言论似乎预示着管理实践的一场革命，而从业者确实采用了复杂系统的原理。可持续性术语仍将重点放在对环境负责的公司活动上，但是，管理传播教学法尚未认识到适应性传播实践的新兴论述。