A Retrospective and Foresight: Bibliometric Review of International Research on Strategic Management for Sustainability, 1991–2019

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, scholars have been calling for modern management theory and research to consider how strategic management tools could be applied to enhance corporate sustainability. While strategic management for sustainability has emerged as a multidisciplinary field, the existing knowledge base has yet to be systematic reviewed. This paper responded to the literature gap by conducting a bibliometric review of strategic management for sustainability. The paper aimed to document the landscape and composition of this literature through the analysis of 988 relevant Scopus-indexed documents. Data analyses found that the strategic management for sustainability knowledge base remained an emergent field with increasing interests from diverse groups of international scholars in various fields, particularly in environmental science, engineering, and strategic business management. Over the past three decades, the literatures have been continuously grown from a few publications in the early 1990s to almost 1000 documents to date. The review found that the most influential journals and authors of this knowledge base were international in scope but predominately from Western developed countries. Five Schools of Thought from author co-citation analysis revealed the intellectual clustering composition of the knowledge base on strategic management for sustainability: corporate sustainability strategy, sustainable waste management, strategic sustainability systems, strategic sustainability management and entrepreneurship, and sustainability assessment strategy. Key topics addressed in this research include the distribution of documents across the most highly cited journals, reflecting the breadth, quality and influential scholars in the strategic management for sustainability knowledge domain, naming of the influential scholars in the field and identification of contemporary foci and research front in the existing literature through the keyword co-occurrence analysis and co-word map. The strategic management for sustainability field has evolved from the key topics related to the green movement at the policy-driven macro level (i.e., ecological or environmental protection/impact, water/waste management and natural resource conservation) to the practicality in organizations with the topics related to social strategic responsibility and business management issues (i.e., corporate strategy, project management, supply chain management, information management, adaptive management, corporate sustainability). In addition to a retrospective, insightful prospective interpretation, practical implication, limitations and future research direction are discussed.

Sustainability Reporting in the Public Realm—Trends and Patterns in Knowledge Development

“…Thus, the present study aims to fill this gap and focuses on detecting the process of the advancement of the research field through a different approach, by applying the tools of bibliometric analysis. Consequently, the present study extends prior bibliometric reviews on sustainability performed in specific areas, such as management [18][19][20][21], banking [22,23], tourism [1,24] or accounting [4,25].…”

“…Over the recent past, many scholars performed bibliometric analyses on sustainable development in particular areas such as social finance and sustainable banking [22,23], sustainable business models in tourism [1,24], strategic management for sustainability [18,21], sustainable development and its goals (SDGs) [19,20], integrated thinking and reporting or non-financial disclosure in the EU Directive 2014/95 perspective [4,25]. Thus, our methodological approach follows the research strategy adopted in prior studies.…”

Sustainable Strategic Management Model for Hotel Companies: A Multi-Stakeholder Proposal to “Walk the Talk” toward SDGs

“…However, to do so, it is essential to understand the evolution that the strategic management for sustainability has undergone: during its beginnings, it was involved in matters related to the green movement and to research related to business management and strategic social responsibility, affirms Suriyankietkaew, [98] who identifies up to five schools of thought related to strategic management for sustainability, which reflects the breadth of studies on this subject. The authors Baldessare et al identify the gap between sustainable design theory and business practice [99], and they have identified a "sustainable business model" as one of the four levels of design for sustainable innovation.…”

COVID-19 Impacts and Sustainability Strategies for Regional Recovery in Southeast Asia: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Moreover, the rethinking toward future transformations, resilience and sustainable development would require leadership for sustainability [25]. A strategic foresight and strategic management for sustainability would also be needed to balance the traditional economic-social-environmental triad and integrate holistic systems and processes toward sustainability at all levels of the society [26]. To provide a systematic review of the three pillars of sustainability and future research agenda Global Global Ranjbari et al, (2021) [14] To study the post COVID-19 recovery agenda with a fuzzy action priority surface for sustainable development to support the 2030 Agenda in Iran Country Iran Taqi et al, (2020) [22] To identify impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on supply chains and propose strategies in the context of the readymade garment industry Country Bangladesh --Wang and Huang (2021) [10] To review publications related to the impact of COVID-19 on sustainability in the Web of Science database using the bibliometrics techniques and meta-analysis approach Global Global Winchester et al, (2021) [19] To research impact of COVID-19 social distancing policies on traffic congestion, mobility and NO 2 pollution Country USA --…”