Mapping 70 Years of advancements in management research on sustainability
Introduction
In the last decade, ‘grand challenges’ (GCs) have become an increasingly attractive entry point for management scholarship to conduct pragmatic and action-oriented research that bridges the business-society-nature interface (Marcus et al., 2010). According to George et al. (2016), GCs are defined as “a specific critical barrier(s) that, if removed, would help solve an important societal problem with a high likelihood of global impact through widespread implementation” (George et al., 2016, p. 1881).
What some scholars refer to as the ‘greatest challenge’ facing management research, the ever-widening research-practice gap becomes notably extended as businesses continue to underestimate the interconnectivity and urgency associated with GCs (Banks et al., 2016; Bansal and Hoffman, 2012). This underscores the lingering need for new ontological framings of GCs that move beyond mechanistic and reductionist research paradigms, to deepen understandings of ‘how’ and ‘why’ proven strategies for addressing GCs can be successfully transferred, scaled, and sustained across dynamic and emerging landscapes (Rynes and Bartunek, 2017). The authors posit that for solutions to become more actionable, a new transdisciplinary research agenda is required.
As an evolving field of research and practice, Sustainability Management (SM) embodies a functional response to the historical limitations of siloed (sustainability; management) sciences and their capacity to help businesses navigate dynamic, uncertain transition processes (Williams et al., 2017). Rather than a GC in-of-itself, the authors hold that ‘sustainability’ provides a research paradigm (by which scholars perceive and act on GCs) that, when embedded into management language, theory, and method, provides a systems approach to drawing interconnections between business activities and GCs, spanning organizational boundaries and traditional stakeholder groups (Dyllick and Muff, 2016; Gladwin et al., 1995).
This study aims to explore how sustainability, as a distinct research paradigm within management research, is reflected in the research discourse of top business and management journals and whether and how this framing more effectively targets the GCs of today. This review is the most extensive study of its kind on SM literature, collectively screening 46,856 publications across 27 top management journals. Using novel computational advancements in text mining, mapping, and visualization, this review outlines past and emerging research foci, key shortcomings and conceptual gaps in SM thinking, highlighting opportunities to integrate and expand on existing discourse. There remains immense potential to synthesize findings of individual studies to advance scholarship on SM as a stand-alone field of study. This review concludes by identifying four avenues for future research to advance the study of SM; under the umbrellas of language, method, theory, and the operationalization of GCs.
Building upon existing strengths and bringing together traditionally separate research agendas, the authors advocate for SM as a transdisciplinary framing capable of supporting future management research in its capacity to inform evidence-based practice as deemed necessary to support organizations in tackling grand societal challenges (Briner et al., 2009; Laasch et al., 2020a, Laasch et al., 2020b; Rousseau, 2012; Rynes and Bartunek, 2017).
Issues of sustainability have become increasingly salient across management literature. The topic has been approached through various foci, including climate change (Chandy et al., 2019; Wright and Nyberg, 2017); education (Muff et al., 2017; Waddock, 2020); resilience (DesJardine et al., 2019; Hamann et al., 2020); responsibility (Laasch et al., 2020; Voegtlin et al., 2019); ethics (Martí, 2018); paradox (Schad and Smith, 2018); systems thinking (Bansal et al., 2020); and sustainable development (Howard-Grenville et al., 2019). Admittedly still a nascent and emerging body of knowledge, management research on GCs are inherently confined to specific areas of study, with sustainability framings constituting but a minor proportion of total research outputs (Aguinis et al., 2020; Hamann et al., 2020). For solutions to become more actionable, a new language and broadened participation is required, engaging a range of disciplines, theoretical, and methodological approaches across multiple levels of organization and society in the form of SM (Starik and Kanashiro, 2013).
Grand challenges have been adopted as a moniker by management researchers when examining the role of political, institutional, and social structures and their relative contributions to the persistence and attenuation of deleterious effects on socio-ecological functioning (George et al., 2016; Howard-Grenville et al., 2019; Wright and Nyberg, 2017). While constituting systemic global problems, requiring collective action to sustain widespread implementation, these challenges are experienced locally and contextually nuanced (Berrone et al., 2016). Characterized by their complexity, uncertainty, and normativity (Ferraro et al., 2015), the capacity for research to devise meaningful solutions lie in its ability to drive behavioural change and socio-technical transitions. While theoretically robust and responsible for providing important scientific insights and helpful recommendations for practice, the current state of affairs constitutes a dangerous trap of incrementalism and impedes timely progress towards fulfilling societal needs.
Grounded in normative principles of human behaviour, organizing, and managing, the goal of SM is to continuously enhance the ability of individuals, organizations, and societies to experience benefits from natural and socioeconomic systems (Williams et al., 2017). Compared to previous iterations of managerial sciences, the field of SM research represents a key departure in theoretical logic, moving past historical patterns that are narrowly human elite-dominated, bound by siloed thinking (Gladwin et al., 1995). If viewed as a compilation (that being one where SM is a complex combination of the contributions of lower-level management and sustainability research field), then SM provides the applied lens necessary for progressing management discourse through the translation of sustainability criteria into political, institutional, and behavioural reform (Molina-Azorín et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2017).
Linnenluecke and Griffiths' (2013) study on the origins and structure of the corporate sustainability field is among the few cross-cutting bodies of research to date, providing analysis on sustainability-related trends and themes. Taking a broader definition of sustainability (to include topics related to responsibility, responsiveness, and greening, among others), they clustered the field into four distinct conceptual genealogies: corporate social performance theory, stakeholder theory, a corporate social performance versus economic performance debate, and a greening of management debate. Williams et al.’s (2017) study on systems thinking and SM similarly adopts a cross-cutting approach to SM research, using a ‘systems’ lens, the authors delineate core fields for future research, including behavioural change; leadership; industrial ecology; socio-ecological systems; transitions management; paradigm shifts; and education. The authors go one step further to suggest that these areas of research hold shared principles of interconnectivity, feedback loops, emergence, and self-organization (Williams et al., 2017). While previous iterations of management theory do not focus on sustainability, and in doing so, fail to address GCs (i.e. Sustainable Development Goals), management theories do hold an advantage over organizational theories in that management can be performed at multiple levels, from individual through organizational to societal levels. Thus, as noted by Starik and Kanashiro (2013), it may be a worthy endeavour to explore which management theories can be used to advance evidence-based practice(s) as part of this field.
The objective of this paper is thus to present the current state of academic discourse on SM to provide insights into current focal areas of research discourse, how it differentiates itself from ‘conventional’ management (CM) literature, and where it should go over the next crucial decade of action on GCs. This objective is achieved over three steps. First, this paper examines each subfield of SM and CM independently and over time to present historical research agendas and future avenues for research. Second, this paper compares SM and CM literature to identify how the two subfields differ. Finally, a deductive analysis of grand challenges and theories helps highlight research agendas where each field can develop over the next decade.
Section snippets
Data and method
This research adopts a mixed approach to the content analysis methodology combining inductive, deductive, and comparative elements to garner insights into how sustainability literature has evolved over time and in relation to management literature (Creswell, 2014; Elo and Kyngäs, 2008; Hseigh and Shannon, 2005). By identifying nascent and latent trends in sustainability discourse within management literature, this research contributes to existing literature reviews in this space. Unique to this
Results and discussion
This study identified the features and criteria differentiating SM from CM and employed these framings in combination with existing literature to inform how SM is effective in addressing grand challenges and where the subfield lags. The results help to further corroborate positions forwarded by previous research (Hörisch et al., 2015; Kiesnere and Baumgartner, 2019; Williams et al., 2017) - that SM is a nascent, emerging, and impactful framing by which management scholars can address GCs. Where
Conclusion
This study presents an overview of the last 70 years of management scholarship to identify how sustainability, as a research paradigm within management research, is reflected through discourse in top business and management journals. The results first attest that SM is a nascent, emerging, and impactful framing by which management scholars can address GCs. Novel methodological approaches within management literature, such as the proliferation of bibliometrics, natural language processing, topic
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Truzaar Dordi: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. Nicholas Palaschuk: Conceptualization, Investigation, Project administration, Resources, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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