Natural Sciences,Management Theory,and System Transformation for Sustainability

The Promise of Natural Science Theories

As the articles in this Special Issue demonstrate, natural science approaches provide the potential for a more integrated approach to understanding human behavior, in which sociocultural phenomena are seen as arising from or influenced by thermodynamic and natural selection pressures facing our ancient ancestors (e.g., Frederick, 2012). “Natural” perspectives on human behavior reflect both the social embeddedness and biological nature of individuals, organizations, and, indeed, the entire human project. A merger between modern natural sciences and business research is needed to address the complex reality of our discipline (Gummesson, 2006), especially given the current state of the natural environment. Dominant theories and ideas about ethics, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and even the updated version of CSR, corporate sustainability and responsibility (Visser, 2013), fall far short of bringing the crucial understanding about natural processes, systems understanding, and core scientific insights drawn from the wide variety of so-called hard sciences into management theory. That shortfall motivated this Special Issue of Business & Society.

Some biologists have suggested that evolutionary theories provide opportunity for business ethicists to understand and thus “fortify the other-oriented tendencies of human beings—our tendencies toward sympathy, reciprocity, and loyalty—and to counter our destructive tendencies, such as within-group violence and cheating” (Flack & de Waal, 2004, p. 23). The relevance of biological perspectives (including both the neurosciences and evolutionary theory), for example, to socially and environmentally responsible behavior is rooted in the belief that cooperation and compassion develops, in part, from the evolutionary forces present in human life (Cropanzano & Becker, 2013; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003).

Evolutionary approaches provide a broad set of underlying assumptions concerning human behavior, different from traditional management assumptions, which in turn can be used in business ethics, CSR/CR, and sustainability research. Evolutionary theory maintains that “the complexity of systems is guided on its evolutionary path through the transmission of information and its selection . . .” (Nowotny, 2005, p. 20). In keeping with recent efforts to incorporate biological evolution into the organizational sciences (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Frederick, 2012; Ilies et al., 2006; Nicholson & White, 2006; Saad, 2006), our goal in this volume is to inform sustainability research about novel ways to motivate managerial and organizational behavior toward ecological initiatives. If human nature is profoundly affected by the evolutionary history of our species (Greene, 2013; Nicholson, 1998), it is reasonable to expect that evolutionary and other “hard” science theories can provide clues into behavior within organizations.

As another example, the development of neuroscience over the last decades also has dramatically changed the way we understand human behavior, in general, and decision-making, in particular (Damasio & Damasio, 2012). Insights from cognitive neuroscience have the potential to advance management research and devise new research questions (Becker & Cropanzano, 2010; Hills, 2012; Lindebaum, 2016; McDonald & Tang, 2014). However, neuroscientific findings and the models they have generated remain largely unknown in most disciplines devoted to predicting human behavior. In addition, the basic building blocks of social science theories are often inconsistent with neuroscientific evidence. As Weber (2013) noted,

Living beings are one interrelated, embodied whole, of which humans comprise only a fractional portion. The real flow of the efficiency approach to sustainability is that nature is still seen as something “outside” that can be used for human means. But nature is not outside of us. It is inside of us—and we are inside of it. (p. 18)

This type of perspective might focus attention away from a predominantly human-centric perspective around human enterprise toward a more nature- or world-centric perspective. Understanding could also be enhanced through incorporation of complexity science and systems dynamics, which provide a more integrated, albeit more difficult to research, set of approaches to phenomena than the more mechanistic, fragmented approaches more common today.

Neurological studies further suggest a relationship between various practices and the emergence of a more ethical nature (Crilly et al., 2008; Schneider, Zollo & Manocha, 2010). Some organizational behavior scholars have suggested that a new, biologically rooted subfield be created to understand the primary causes of behavior in organizations through the mapping of neural mechanisms (Becker et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2012). Others have suggested that there is a need to integrate research on neuroscience, management, and psychology so that better understanding of decision-making processes can be gained (e.g., Laureiro-Martínez et al., 2010). While there is caution raised regarding the methodological and technological challenges related to embracing this type of research, the promise of neuroscience and social neuroscience research is difficult to deny (Ashkanasy et al., 2014; Healey & Hodgkinson, 2014; Robertson et al., 2017). The challenges can be overcome with a dialogue between disciplines.

Articles in This Special Issue

This Special Issue on Natural Sciences, Management Theory, and System Transformation for Sustainability is associated with the second edition of the ARTEM Organizational Creativity and Sustainability Conference (ARTEM-OCC) held at ICN Business School in Nancy, France, in September 2017. ¹ Building on the idea that research on creativity and sustainability is not restricted to specific fields, but rather, is normally approached from cross-disciplinary perspectives, the ARTEM-OCC was organized to bring together academics, business professionals, artists, and engineers. Discussions focus on new ways of thinking about current business models as well as how to define and explore paths for the emergence of newer, disruptive, and more sustainable business and management models. Particularly, the international conference’s objective was to provide a discursive forum for participants to explore sustainable realities that go beyond the neo-classic paradigm of economic growth through the application of creativity in its various forms. The track out of which this Special Issue was manifested examined original research on how natural science theories can help lead to transformative change toward sustainable futures. The Special Issue was inspired by this conference track, but the articles in this volume are the result of an open call.

The articles selected for this Special Issue address diverse topics within sustainability research. They represent original research efforts aimed at bridging perspectives to address ecological challenges. In designing this issue, we were particularly interested in showcasing different perspectives that represent the mutual influence and dependency between concepts and theories to provide an initial pattern on how to facilitate the dialectic process which can also be seen as an orientation for further research. Given the urgency of embedding sustainability in management theory and practice, this current volume takes a normative tone by publishing articles arguing for purposeful change. Researchers are challenged to “be impolite and to challenge existing power structures in both society and academia” (Hoffman & Jennings, 2019).

In “Management Education and Earth Systems Science: Transformation as if Planetary Boundaries Mattered,” Mark Edwards, Jose Alcaraz, and Sarah Cornell apply Earth Systems Science (ESS) to issues of Management Education. ESS, as the authors state, is “interdisciplinary research that incorporates multiple physical and natural science disciplines in taking the entire Earth system as its focus of study.” Past applications have examined climate change and biodiversity that, along with other ESS research, “integrates human and natural systems at local, regional, and planetary scales.” On this framework, the authors examine management education. In doing so, the authors raise concerns about the current relationship between business and society and therefore call for a “radical reframing” that embeds economic and social systems within the global sustainability of natural systems.

Andrew Hoffman and Dev Jennings focus their article, “From Collapse to Re-Enlightenment: An Institutional-Political Reading of Anthropocene Society,” on rethinking organization-environmental relationships by reorienting institutional theory to interpret this current era. They challenge us to consider a new paradigm for environmental and social sustainability research. The authors introduce change mechanisms designed to politicize institutional theory for imagining what future societies dominated by humans may look like. Through the exploration of four archetypes involving collapsing systems, market rules, technology, and culture, they extend our current conceptions of institutional theory to better position ourselves for the future.

“Cross-Scale Systemic Resilience: Implications for Organizational Studies” by Amanda Williams, Gail Whiteman, and Steve Kennedy argues that to understand systemic resilience we need to work across scales and understand the interrelationships and feedback loops inherent in nested systems. From the perspective of complex adaptive systems and using the example of palm oil production in Borneo to illustrate their point, they highlight the potential for significant new areas of research. In particular, they emphasize the importance of identifying issues related to the relevant scale or level of analysis, as well as how slow variables and their feedback loops, diversity, and redundancy contribute to systemic wellbeing.

Saphira Rekker, Jacquelyn Humphrey, and Katherine O’Brien assess whether today’s major rating schemes for corporate environmental performance do much to adequately capture actual environmental performance of the corporation in their article, “Do Environmental Rating Schemes Capture Climate Goals?” Shockingly, their study finds that these ratings actually fail to track corporate performance vis-à-vis global climate targets, like the 2°C target (or, perhaps more importantly, the IPCC’s more recent 1.5°C target). They determine that only five of the ratings even include data that would make it possible to track performance against these global climate targets. They conclude that far greater integration and dialogue are called for between corporate efforts and international regulatory bodies.

Finally, the article, “A Percolation-Like Process of Within-Organization Collective Corruption: A Computational Approach,” written by Sang-Joon Kim and Jegoo Lee, uses a percolation-based systems dynamics model, underpinned by a computational model to address the issue of corruption. Percolation models were developed in fluid physics as a way to explain how percolation happens in natural systems, and here that idea is applied in an innovative approach to human systems to understand how corruption diffuses through the spread of information and behaviors or “social percolation.” This percolation-based approach helps explain why corruption is so pervasive in certain systems and places.

Moving Forward

In his Encyclical Letter, Caritas in Veritate, from 2009, Pope Benedict XVI stated in response to a perceived humanistic crisis for business and the economy that “The different aspects of the crisis, its solutions, and any new development that the future may bring . . . require new efforts at holistic understanding and a new humanistic synthesis” (June 29, 2009, n. 21). More recently, Pope Francis released his Encyclical Laudato Si’, which emphasizes a greater concern for sustainability and equity in human societies, as well as welfare for nonhuman beings (Francis, 2015). In Laudato Si’, he calls on scholars, practitioners, and citizens to promote a humanistic concern for individuals through a concern for the environment, recognizing that both climate change and potential ecosystem collapse will affect the poor significantly more than the wealthy. Pope Francis acknowledges that society is plagued by a throwaway culture; that business does not yet adopt and embrace a circular model of production that will serve the needs of present and future generations. This also reflects a concern shared by all the authors of the articles in this volume.

One global response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the era of human-induced climate change, has been the UN Agenda 2030 and implementation of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs). Through these global goals, which aim for global prosperity and peace for all, 193 countries agreed to commit to a set of goals related to protecting the Earth’s life-support systems and improving living conditions for all, including life on land and seas. For example, the SDGs aim at eliminating hunger and extreme poverty, improving overall health and wellbeing, as well as gender and economic equality, sustainable production and consumption, and economic growth, providing universal education.

Implementing these goals requires creative integration of arts and humanities with the natural and social sciences, including management disciplines, that promote interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary analyses of SDG implementation. Of particular importance is the discovery of synergies, interdependences, connections, and co-benefits among realizing different goals, and also the tradeoffs between them, which really speak to the need for greater collaboration across disciplines. Some of the important challenges include data integration and the development of integrated indicators for the SDGs—across levels and addressing multiple scales and goals. Critical to this effort is the communication and transfer of knowledge, or what Kim and Lee call percolation, across various disciplines (van Dijkum, 2001) in processes that scientists have called earth system stewardship and governance (Biermann et al., 2010, 2012) or simply Earth stewardship (Chapin et al., 2011, 2015). And of course, the management education classroom also needs to fully integrate these new types of understanding, as noted in their special issue article by Edwards, Alcaraz, and Cornell. The dialogue must include discussions about research design and theory in the context of the Anthropocene, and across different levels, a point argued strongly by Williams, Whiteman, and Kennedy in this issue. As Strang (2009) notes,

efforts, crossing disciplines ranging from economics and management to the physical sciences to the social sciences including political science, and others, to ensure that all participants are able to make use of . . . a model that conceptually integrates socio-cultural and biophysical complexities. (p. 2)

This bridging of knowledge domains must also include business practitioners in what is becoming known as co-creative processes (e.g., Kuenkel, 2016) to develop new systems that actually address the real “meat” of socioecological problems, unlike many of today’s systems, as addressed by Rekker in this issue. The “development of new approaches to ecosystem management and corporate involvement absolutely require cultivating cross-disciplinary discourse, nurturing of multidisciplinary perspectives, and drawing on the innovative capabilities of the many practitioners developing new approaches on the ground” (Winn & Pogutz, 2013, p. 224), and, most likely, new forms of action research (Bradbury-Huang, 2015), not just traditional forms of research. Nonprofit organizations such as Future Earth provide useful forums for scientists, academics, engineers, and entrepreneurs to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and collaboration for sustainability (www.futureearth.org). Certainly, associations such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, World Economic Forum, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like the World Wildlife Fund, working with multilateral organizations like the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative, can create new and innovative global communities, and multisector, transdisciplinary collaborations for discussing, researching, and dealing with future challenges as well. Cross-disciplinary, multisector, and transdisciplinary partnerships are critical for progress, as SDG 17, which explicitly calls for partnerships to achieve the goals, makes clear, in recognition of their interconnectedness and “wickedness” (Churchman, 1967; Rittel & Webber, 1973).

This Special Issue’s submissions provide an important first step forward for broadening the business and society field’s efforts for addressing sustainability through recognition of the need for trans-, inter-, and multidisciplinary scholarship. It is important for the field to take a quantum worldview that emphasizes that humans are not distinct from nature, but that “we are all part of one interconnected fabric of existence” (Laszlo, 2019, p. 6) and in so doing recognize the inherent complexity of the socioecological systems of interest (Waddock et al., 2015). Quantum thinking requires that we include physical and natural science theories in our research to address human and ecological problems, because such systems constitute what physicist Fritjof Capra (Capra & Luisi, 2014) notes is an interconnected web of life. Ontologically, quantum science is guided by principles of nonlinearity, entanglement, and nonlocality for the achievement of flourishing (Goswami, 2015; Laszlo & Brown, 2014; Rotmans & Loorbach, 2009; Stacey, 1995). For complex systems, the highest leverage point needed to enact change involves “shifting the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises” (Meadows, 1999) or even ultimately, as Meadows amended, transcending + mindsets.

We strongly advocate that future research in business and society promotes “blue marble thinking,” a term coined by Patton (2016), which means “thinking globally, holistically, and systemically; in essence, thinking of the world and its peoples . . .” (p. 383). The blue marble is the image of the Earth as seen from 20,000 miles away. Blue marble thinking maintains that we cannot look at our planet in terms of national and human-created borders, but must see it holistically, as a global system of dynamic interactions between humans and other life forms, with a range of interactive and interdependent ecosystems. Blue marble thinking entails looking at the big picture and that is what we have tried to promote in this volume. We wish to point out though that much, much more of that type of thinking is needed to move our field, the sciences, the arts, and the humanities to where they need to be to promote a world of flourishing for all. Blue marble thinking has particular relevance to addressing the challenges posed by the SDGs or, for that matter, the Paris Climate Accord, when used as a way of thinking about how transformational change and development might come about.

This being said, we would be remiss not to acknowledge that the natural science disciplines are faced with similar constraints as the social sciences. While we continue to believe in the potential of natural sciences theories to provide valuable insights into management and business research, the blue marble thinking we advocate is limited by the same paradigmatic change process that we see in the social science fields. We call for revolutionary thinking in this issue. However, paradigmatic shifts are often painstakingly slow to take effect, as Kuhn suggests. Much natural science research is embedded in the same grand narrative of progress and the same neoliberal domination we discussed earlier in this introductory article. Regardless, a dialogue across disciplines from natural science to social science and management is still necessary in our view.

No single discipline, even one as eclectic and multirooted as the business in society field, can tackle these so-called grand challenges on its own. The articles in this volume indicate, and we argue that we all must learn to collaborate across boundaries, to play well with others, as kindergarten teachers almost universally emphasize. That transition will not, it is likely, be easy, but it is necessary. Thus, beyond this Special Issue we hope researchers in the field will conduct their work with this satellite perspective for understanding issues in business and society.