We review the literature about shop scheduling problems in manufacturing systems, revealing the concepts and methodologies that most impact the usage of scheduling theory in manufacturing environments. We focus our attention on the job shop and flow shop problems and their variants. We emphasize the interactions between the scheduling functions and manufacturing paradigms such as Industry 4.0, Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Computer‐Aided Process Planning, Advanced Planning and Scheduling, and Integrated Process Planning and Scheduling. We describe the main components and characteristics of the scheduling ecosystem, and we discuss how the scheduling interacts with the components that make it up and how it is affected by them. The metadata collected from the digital libraries on which the review was based (ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Elsevier) made it possible to characterize the historical evolution of the main concepts of the scheduling ecosystem in terms of scientific publications and research trends in the period 2000–2020.