Scholars from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives have sought to unravel the high complexities of sustainability. A mature understanding of sustainability management requires studies to adopt a multidisciplinary systemic lens capable of appreciating the interconnectivity of economic, political, social and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions. Yet the field of systems thinking in the context of sustainability management research is disparate and can benefit from a comprehensive review in order to assimilate the current fragmented body of research and to identify promising research directions. To address this gap, we conducted a review of the systems thinking and sustainability management literature from 1990 up to 2015 including 96 articles. In this review, we first present descriptives that show an emerging body of work rapidly growing since 2011. We found that 54 percent of articles were published in two transdisciplinary journals, demonstrating that a systemic approach is not yet prevalent in mainstream management journals. Second, we identify and describe the core theoretical concepts of systems thinking found in the literature including interconnections, feedbacks, adaptive capacity, emergence and self-organization. Third, findings show a number of research themes, including behavioral change, leadership, innovation, industrial ecology, socialecological systems, transitions management, paradigm shifts and sustainability education. Finally we offer a cross-scale integrated framework of our findings, and conclude by identifying a number of promising research opportunities.
In this article, we posit that a cross-scale perspective is valuable for studies of organizational resilience. Existing research in our field primarily focuses on the resilience of organizations, that is, the factors that enhance or detract from an organization's viability in the face of threat. While this organization level focus makes important contributions to theory, organizational resilience is also intrinsically dependent upon the resilience of broader social-ecological systems in which the firm is embedded. Moreover, long-term organizational resilience cannot be well managed without an understanding of the feedback effects across nested systems. For instance, a narrow focus on optimizing organizational resilience from one firm's perspective may come at the expense of social-ecological functioning and ultimately undermine managers' efforts at long-term organizational survival. We suggest that insights from natural science may help organizational scholars to examine crossscale resilience and conceptualize organizational actions within and across temporal and spatial dynamics. We develop propositions taking a complex adaptive systems perspective to identify issues related to focal scale, slow variables and feedback, and diversity and redundancy. We illustrate our
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.