A Solid Foundation But What Will Be Built on It? Reviews of the Management,Organizations,and Environmental Sustainability Field

Abstract

In this conceptual essay, we integrate broader insights into the state of research on management, organizations, and environmental sustainability, enabling a clearer view of where the field stands and the directions in which it should best grow. To this end, we first review the findings and insights of the articles published within this special review issue. Then, we define a set of emerging themes from viewing the set of articles collectively, highlighting the communalities and trends within the field but also rising concerns. Based on this assessment, we propose several remedies and a future agenda that would help our field to become more inclusive and impactful. In this final section, we specifically and critically expand on (a) the imperative of interdisciplinarity; (b) the need to avoid being trapped in the mainstream; and (c) a corresponding institutionalized intent to develop further novel approaches for research in our field.

Keywords

literature review systematic review environmental sustainability interdisciplinarity transdisciplinarity levels of analysis metrics value

Introduction

The field defined by management, organizations, and environmental sustainability has been in a robust growth phase for several decades. Signs of an expanding scholarly beachhead are widely evident, with sustainability at the core of a flourishing cluster of scholarly journals, research centers, and degree programs.

Given the successful launch of this academic field, it is timely for Organization and Environment to publish a series of articles that survey some of its important topical areas. The review articles included in this special issue touch upon central intellectual domains, such as business models and competitive strategy, as well as a number of specific subjects, such as greenwashing, environmental justice, and climate change. Each provides an outstanding source of knowledge and history about their subjects, along with a critical analysis of what we have learned and the most productive next steps. Table 1 gives an overview of the seven articles and their coverage of the literature.¹

Table 1.

Overview of Review Topics.

Authors	Title	Review sample	Period covered
Burbano, V. C., Delmas, M. A., & Cobo, M. J.	The past and future of corporate sustainability research	11,954 journal articles	1994–2021
Lüdeke-Freund, F., Froese, T., Dembek, K., Rosati, F., & Massa, L.	What makes a business model sustainable? Activities, design themes, and value functions	390 journal articles	2004–2021
Foster, A., Wissman, N., Bray, L. A., DeBoer, J., Ergene, S., Stewart, O. J., & Dunham, I. M.	Rising to the challenge: Embedding environmental justice in management and organization studies.	7,173 journal articles	1990–2022
A. Wren Montgomery, A. W., Lyon, T. P., & Barg, J.	No end in sight? A greenwash review and research agenda	156 journal articles	2015–2022
Morales-Raya, M., & Muñoz, P.	Varieties of time in business sustainability research: An integrative review and research agenda	172 journal articles	2000–2022
Unter, K. M. M., Park, S., & Rivera, J.	Business response strategies to climate change: An integrative and research frontiers outlook	163 journal articles	1987–2021
Tardin, M. G., Perin, M. G., Simões, C., & Braga, L. D.	Organizational sustainability orientation: A review	112 journal articles	2001–2022

In this introductory article, we want to draw attention to and discuss a few common themes that characterize these reviews and allow us to draw conclusions about our field. Two of the common themes, we believe, are highly consequential and relatively overlooked by researchers. Connectivity is pivotal in several reviews. It has several layers but a crucial element is the importance of creating connections and relationships: between topics, issues, communities, and disciplines. Connectivity is a leverage point for reaching out intellectually to other audiences and engaging in systemic change. To do so successfully requires an element of integration, which emerges from another of the themes we identify, that of interactions across multiple levels. To these two themes, we add more familiar themes of adding value and developing metrics. But here also, the reviews add depth to our understanding and an occasional twist. For example, several articles question the very basis of value, asking for whom it is created and why.

The themes that we distilled from the reviews shaped our propositions for where scholars could be directing their intellectual energies. One is the clear need for interdisciplinary initiatives. We offer ideas about interdisciplinarity on terrain that ranges from straightforward institutional initiatives to higher-order concepts based on epistemology. We also leverage common elements of the reviews to argue for the importance of our field maintaining its commitment to higher-order goals. Many readers might find our propositions in this regard unsettling and even incomprehensible, given the incentive systems we face as academics. But for us, that is a feature and not a bug, accentuating and reinforcing the distinctions that we in the field so treasure.

Emergent Themes

The articles in this special issue offer literature reviews that are essential to mapping several critical research domains. As Gond et al. (2023) show, literature reviews are performative, through a dual movement of re-presenting and intervening. But beyond their contributions to specific research areas, when considered together, the reviews reveal commonalities and trends that inform us about the field at a higher, more unifying level. We would like to direct readers’ attention to four themes that emerged when we assessed these reviews collectively.

Connectivity

Connectivity is a central theme that emerges from the reviews of this special issue. The notion of connectivity manifests itself in different ways. Perhaps most essentially, connectivity is advocated across reviews with regard to a systemic perspective, with Burbano et al. (2024) as well as Morales-Raya and Muñoz (2024) arguing that natural and organizational aspects are often strongly connected in the sustainability context. In a tighter focus, Foster et al. (2024: 160), when reviewing the literature on environmental justice, relate this further to social aspects. They refer to “interconnected social and ecological issues,” which ultimately also implies a co-evolution of business organizations and social systems (Porter, 2006), a point also made by Unter et al. (2024). Foster et al. (2024) point out that environmental justice today is largely detached from management and organization literature that has predominantly economic aspects at its core. They urge those in the management and organization field to strengthen links to environmental sociology (a field that was central to O&E’s editorial heritage).

Connectivity also refers to the divide between the environmental and social aspects of sustainability. For example, Tardin et al. (2024) call for a stronger integration of social aspects into organizational sustainability orientation that would put it on an equal footing with environmental aspects. They argue that this requires connections with communities, a notion reiterated by Foster et al. (2024), who point to the need to break the silos of societal and ecological issues. Lüdeke-Freund et al. (2024) make a plea to integrate social sustainability aspects more into research on business models for sustainability. This aligns with Foster et al. (2024) promoting inspiration from the environmental justice literature, for example, when it comes to the question of how low-income groups in society can better afford greener business model offerings.

A final aspect of connectivity concerns associations between specific topics. For example, Unter et al. (2024) suggest important interactions between corporate climate change strategies and greenwashing. This mirrors Montgomery et al.’s (2024) highlighting of carbon neutrality commitments by firms as a future key context of greenwashing.

Several articles in this special issue also raise the issue of the connection to practice. For example, Burbano et al. (2024) derive from their review a necessity to engage in broader and more practice-oriented collaborations to arrive at more meaningful indicators and metrics, such as when the context of environment, social, and governance (ESG) more carefully integrates carbon neutrality and biodiversity.

Multiple Levels of Analysis

A second shared theme is the need to explore various levels of analysis and the interactions across these levels. For example, Tardin et al. (2024) analyze the construct of sustainability organization at the organizational level but also discuss linkages to the individual-level sustainability orientation. Similarly, Burbano et al. (2024) identify the firm as the dominant level of analysis in research on corporate sustainability but at the same time stress how this misses important embedding. Such embedding would reflect the firm’s place in its field and within higher levels. In the context of business models for sustainability, Lüdeke-Freund et al. (2024) point out the need to carefully consider aggregation levels for activities (which are situated below the organizational level). Morales-Raya and Muñoz (2024) in their review of temporal aspects of corporate sustainability refer to the process level (as one dimension, next to assets, liabilities, pace, scope, and scale). In this perspective, time can be understood as a level in itself, as we see methodologically in the context of hierarchical linear modeling. This consideration of time also resonates with rising interest in the element of time more generally, as surveyed by Blagoev et al. (2023).

Some of the contributions emphasize a need to broaden levels of analysis in our field. Foster et al. (2024) take the position that issues of environmental justice should be studied in a manner that embeds the organizational level more in its context, such as in supply chains or at the societal level. Burbano et al. (2024) similarly argue for moving from the organizational (meso-) level that dominated the past to simultaneously consider more micro- (e.g., team or individual) and more macro- (e.g., industry or country) levels.

Integrating the level-related aspects in the reviews highlights the need for multilevel system embedding or multilevelness (e.g., Jiang et al., 2022). This notion refers to the interaction and integration across and between levels. Specifically, this means placing organizational research related to the natural environment more intentionally in their social and societal contexts. For example, Montgomery et al. (2024) point out that greenwashing is becoming increasingly societally interwoven, especially using social media diffusion. One method-related implication of this finding is a need for more complex research designs (which in the future would ideally be longitudinal across levels), including experiments (Burbano et al., 2024; Spicer et al., 2021). Similarly, in such a multilevel approach further levels might need to be considered, such as, for example, the team level (Norton et al., 2015).

Beyond methodological integration, multilevelness also requires integrative theory bases across levels, according to several of the reviews in this issue. In their review, Burbano et al. (2024) observe a broadening of theory bases from mainly the market- and resource-based views to include stakeholder theory. In line with this, Tardin et al. (2004) identify the resource-based view (including dynamic capabilities), institutional theory, and stakeholder theory as primary theory bases for works on organizational sustainability orientation. However, they also observe a recent extension encompassing social exchange contingency, paradox, upper echelon, and signaling theories. Partly as a result of these shifts, Burbano et al. (2024) and Foster et al. (2024) make a plea for multilevel theorizing. This would consider systemic embedding of organizations in higher levels, to account for top–down effects, but also of more disaggregated levels affecting organizations, to account for bottom–up effects.

Adding Value

The concept of value has a long history that has left unresolved its inherent ambiguities (Hallberg, 2017). In the sustainability field, of course, one of these ambiguities immediately surfaces: value for whom? The traditional view of shareholder capitalism and its emphasis on value capture (Santos, 2012) certainly would constrain our imagination. Instead, and fortunately for our purposes, articles in this volume significantly broaden our horizons by engaging deeply with this question.

Lüdeke-Freund et al. (2024: 199) place the question of value at the center of their review: “a business model for sustainability refers to how an organization creates, delivers, captures, maintains, unlocks, and shares value with and for its stakeholders.” This expands on and, to an extent, reorients Santos’s (2012: 399) view that: “what distinguishes social entrepreneurship from commercial entrepreneurship is a predominant focus on value creation as opposed to value capture.” The definition by Lüdeke-Freund et al. (2024) certainly is an expansive view of the many relationships between organizations and value, but it allows the authors to go beyond “value creation for a limited set of stakeholders and maximization of the share of value captured by the focal organization (Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2024: 200).” They advance three categories of value functions that define business models for sustainability: value maintenance, unlocking value, and sharing value. In all cases, the beneficiaries lie, to a great extent, outside of the organization.

This essential thread can be pulled through several of the other articles in this issue. Value, as an “inherently subjective and relative concept” (Lüdeke-Freund et al., 2024: 213), underscores the need to appreciate that its dimensions can be in the eyes of the stakeholder. This notion is ratified by Foster et al. (2024), who emphasize that who relevant stakeholders are is a pertinent question. And if there are questions of who is recognized and valued, it follows naturally that how any stakeholder assesses value should not be presumed by a focal organization. Burbano et al. (2024: 146), referencing Cock (2011) on environmental justice, see this movement as “affirming the value of all life forms against the abuse of technology and the interests of wealth and power.” Foster et al. (2024) implicate the relative “placelessness” of corporate strategy research as one reason we have not studied the degradation of value that is particular to locations impacted by firms.

One of the elements in the value theme that emerges in these reviews is the notion of time. One can argue that the more managers reside in a short-term time frame, the more they will have to make painful tradeoffs, as Burbano et al. (2024) have identified. For Morales-Raya and Muñoz (2024), this time dimension is central, as they draw attention to the idea that long-term perspectives deflate the pressures accentuating tradeoffs. Time scales matter. In a strange twist, time produces an emerging method for destroying environmental value through greenwashing that Montgomery et al. (2024: 224) describe as “futurewashing,” wherein long-term promises (e.g., a net zero commitment by 2040) shift the focus away from (poor) actual and current environmental performance.

Metrics Issues

The issue of how to create appropriate, reliable, and widely accepted metrics follows fundamentally from the value theme. This is illustrated by Unter et al. (2024) who point to possible tradeoffs between adaptation and mitigation in the context of climate change. In principle, any mitigated ton of greenhouse gas emissions by one firm would create a positive externality because (by reducing climate change at the margin) it would automatically reduce the adaptation requirements globally. Conversely, the effect of adaption by means of installing air-conditioning equipment in the face of rising temperatures would depend on the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the energy production required to operate the equipment. In the short term, this would likely contribute to global warming, but in the far future this may not necessarily be the case (if all energy production was switched sustainably to renewables), the trade off might disappear. Yet, this hinges on the possibility of creating synergies by means of nature-based solutions, and a “co-evolution between businesses, stakeholders, institutions, and social systems with the natural environment” (Unter et al., 2024: 342).

An important metrics issue follows from the structure of the market for ESG evaluation. Montgomery et al. (2024) emphasize the difficulty of developing mutually accepted metrics for ESG when consulting firms keep their assessment procedures and tools proprietary.² Thus, there are incentives in place that militate against commonly recognized and deployed metrics.

It is also worth noting that there is a certain element of social construction here: after all, whose decision is it, for example, to more heavily weigh air quality over water quality in these evaluations? In a sense, objectivity itself, as assumed in these metrics, is socially constructed—particularly as regards the relative importance of a portfolio of environmental indicators. This may be one reason why environmental justice violations have persisted for so long. Foster et al. (2024) pinpoint tradeoffs resulting from the dual goals of absolute reduction and fair sharing of pollution. For Burbano et al., “environmentalism prioritizes nature preservation, while environmental justice prioritizes communities hit by pollution (Burbano et al., 2024: 146).” Tardin et al. (2024), when addressing organizational sustainability orientations, further connect to this aspect by decrying the lack of studies that draw inferences about social aspects from sustainability orientation variables, indicating that social construction may have created some blind spots in its wake.

Given that the articles in this issue span a range of topics, we believe our synthesis of these themes in the literature on management, organizations, and the natural environment is reasonably descriptive of the literature of our field as a whole. Based on this assertion, and bearing in mind those themes, we would like to make some propositions to push scholars in directions that can realize our manifest, collective potential.

Toward a More Intellectually Inclusive and Impactful Field

The Interdisciplinarity Imperative

We have needed interdisciplinary research in sustainability for decades. Scholars from other disciplines also have called for more collaborations among scientists as well as nonacademic actors (Kates et al., 2001; Lang et al., 2012; Schoolman et al., 2012). Several authors from this issue amplified these pleas. Burbano et al. (2024: 150), stress the need to look outside our disciplines, writing “it is imperative that we engage with researchers beyond our field to facilitate a more comprehensive and effective response to the challenges at hand.” Indeed, for Foster et al. (2024: 163), “grand challenges need interdisciplinary and critical engagement” to drive progress. Finally, Unter et al. (2024: 342), argue for “interdisciplinary integration with theories from the natural sciences,” specifically mentioning socio-ecological resilience theory (e.g., Holling, 2001).

Despite the numerous calls, here and in prior locations,³ interdisciplinarity remains a summit yet scaled. Even in the reviews in this issue, there are scant citations to articles in science journals. One might ask, how we can plead for interdisciplinarity when we ourselves are not reading and citing the work of our colleagues in the sciences?⁴ Less rhetorically, why is achieving this goal so very difficult?

As the French psychoanalyst and political activist Guattari wrote in a typescript in 1992:

Everyone is aware that the complexity of the objects of research in the domain of the human and environmental sciences demands an interdisciplinary approach. But the encounter between disciplines does not permit a decompartmentalization of the problematics and modes of expression brought together. Signs are made from one domain to another in the absence of any in-depth communication. How is a bridge to be established between living ecosystems? (Guattari, 2015: 131)

He also notes that interdisciplinarity will not happen spontaneously. It is “a permanent ‘research into research,’ an experimentation with new paths for the constitution of collective assemblages of enunciation” (Guattari, 2015: 135). Interdisciplinarity is a research process in itself. It requires effort, time, resources (individual and institutional), commitments, and certain skills. It faces many challenges, none of them easy to overcome.

Daniel et al. (2022) identify a number of those challenges. One of the most critical challenges may be simply communicating effectively. There is the nomenclature that is specific to fields, which must be learned—including appreciating that some terms mean quite different things in different disciplines. Referring to communication challenges in one interdisciplinary effort between chemists and organization theorists of which he was a part (Howard-Grenville et al., 2017), Andrew Nelson observed: “Interdisciplinary research is a bit like fusion cuisine: You can create some amazing things, but you have to learn how to translate across and not just work within.” (A. Nelson, personal communication, April 18, 2024).

It is instructive, when considering interdisciplinarity, to recognize that it is a matter of degree. On one end is what we might call “adjacent interdisciplinary,” as when scholars in organizational behavior collaborate with colleagues in psychology. On the other end, we might have scholars in strategic management collaborating with biologists or scholars from the humanities, an endeavor we might term “radical interdisciplinarity” (Russo, 2023). To illustrate, in the first group, units of analysis, methodologies, and terminology are similar. In the second, none of that is necessarily so. Although the returns are higher, the risks associated with this second type of collaboration also are greater, a result of the notorious risk-aversion of academic fields.

But we cannot ignore the potential for radical interdisciplinarity to generate knowledge breakthroughs. What might the path to radical interdisciplinarity look like? We are suggesting three ways that can contribute to and support interdisciplinarity.

Making Space in Journals

What would it take to open up existing journals to more interdisciplinary research in sustainability? There are numerous challenges, including:

- ensuring manuscripts are truly interdisciplinary;

- finding knowledgeable, constructive reviewers, and appreciating that they may only be able to evaluate certain sections of a manuscript; and

- setting parameters for how far afield of the home discipline of the journal a manuscript could be

Yet, with collegiality, patience, and good humor, all of these issues can be handled. One promising possibility is to select a topic for a special issue that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. Several come to mind immediately, including addressing climate change, promoting biodiversity, and establishing circular economies. Beyond this, there may also be a need for new institutional incentive mechanisms. One remarkable consistency emerged from each of our reviews that tracked publication numbers. In each case, the chart displays a hockey stick curve of exponentially increasing numbers of articles. Does this support or hinder interdisciplinary work? Furthermore, would an open access system aimed at maximizing social welfare (as it is increasingly advocated by national research organizations across the globe) be a suitable new mechanism to provide such support?

Changing Institutions

Sometimes, an idea shared by just about everyone is not conventional wisdom, but the truth. And so we believe it is with academic silos. Slowly, change is coming to universities, as several have launched colleges that integrate disciplines. There are encouraging signs indicating that these universities take seriously that interdisciplinarity is not just a matter of who is down the hall. Still, the silo model of academics took centuries to erect, and it will not be dismantled overnight.

To succeed, the universities will need to reward interdisciplinary research. Particularly for junior faculty, this is a treacherous terrain, as interdisciplinary research remains notoriously difficult to pursue (Trinh et al., 2022). The pioneers will generate learning that can be put to use by their academic counterparts elsewhere. As highlighted before for the journal system more narrowly, this also begs the question of what new institutional incentives may be needed, especially in the context of a social media–amplified attention economy.

A Place to Start: Thinking Globally, Convening Locally

On campuses or perhaps within geographically proximate universities, interdisciplinary seminars for faculty and doctoral students are an easy and, if conducted properly, nonthreatening start. Elements might include:

- A weekly seminar with presentations from across the academic disciplines

- Presentations that are designed for nonexperts

- Extensive allowance for questions and answers

- Strong expectations of consistent attendance

- A reception that follows for attendees

The subject matter of the talks is important, but so too would be the ability to receive insight into what collaborations might be possible, and importantly, how working together might unfold. Indeed, shared values are critical to success in these endeavors (Daniel et al., 2022). Informal, and, importantly, nonjudgmental, opportunities to interact are critical to getting collaboration off the ground.

Said differently, we need to create space and time for interdisciplinarity to experiment together, to discuss different types of knowledge and modes of producing it, and as Whatmore (2013) wrote, to reconstruct how research is done. Freeth and Vilsmaier (2020) highlight that collaborative interdisciplinary research requires a continuous balance between observation and participation, curiosity and care, and impartiality and investment. Dynamic proximity, critical reflexivity, and embedded relationality are central practices to navigate those tensions.

The Bigger Picture: Cultivating Epistemological Agility

In the context of interdisciplinarity, epistemological agility means “the ability to discern different disciplinary traditions and navigate between them with confidence to match ontologies with appropriate epistemologies and methodologies” (Haider et al., 2017: 200). Agility is the foundation for researchers to achieve a basic understanding and appreciation of other disciplines and methods. It thereby avoids getting stuck in customary theoretical approaches or paradigms and can help to communicate and collaborate with different disciplines and facilitate interdisciplinary practices.

This agility is one way to address the criticism that scholars have been “looking under the lamppost of the anthropocentric theories that they are most familiar with” Unter et al. (2024: 342), creating a certain “conceptual tunnel vision” Lüdeke-Freund et al. (2024: 213). Tardin et al. (2024: 313) argue that one solution to this intellectual restriction is to “embrace more diverse epistemologies to attain a holistic understanding of the phenomenon.” Burbano et al. (2024: 135) reinforce this idea, asserting that it is essential to recalibrate “theoretical foundations and reimagine methodologies” and to “alter not only what we study, but also the theories and methodologies we employ.”

Theoretically speaking, engaging with theories generally afield of the organization sciences, such as natural sciences and humanities, can help us appreciate the phenomenon through a new lens. With respect to methodology, one path forward is to simply embrace qualitative and especially unconventional research “as a means to see in new ways” (Bansal et al., 2018: 1189). Methodological groundedness, the deep understanding and skillful handling of specific methodological approaches, when combined with epistemological agility, can create opportunities to explore other ways of knowing (Haider et al., 2017) and promote especially radical interdisciplinarity. If, as Kistruck and Slade Shantz (2022) argue, the complexity of the grand challenges of sustainability require less conventional approaches and more methodological diversity, such initiatives can drive constructive scholarly progress.

Avoiding the Mainstream Trap

Several articles in this special issue reiterate that the corporate sustainability field has become well established.⁵ Publications in this area routinely appear in mainstream management journals; specialized journals for this community of scholars have been launched; and academic groups such as the Academy of Management’s ONE (Organizations and the Natural Environment) division and GRONEN (Group for Research on Organizations and the Natural Environment) are thriving.

Although it is important to further legitimize the field, stimulate more research, and create new knowledge, several authors in this special issue warn us about the risk of locking ourselves into mainstream logics, theories, and methodologies. There is a risk of conforming to mainstream literature, adopting the same concepts and paradigms, rather than questioning them and eliciting alternative perspectives. As Burbano et al. (2024) noted, we are stuck in the paradigm of growth and generally accept the primacy of shareholders, firm financial performance, competitive advantage, and economic value creation.

Linked to this point is the tendency of our research to be firm centric (Burbano et al., 2024; Foster et al., 2024). This contributes directly to our myopia in studying sustainability issues and in our understanding of its phenomena. Writing on the related concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), Wickert (2021: 15) made it very clear:

We need to make CSR research a scholarly enterprise that is about the big questions that are worth asking. In the 21st century and in light of the vast challenges we face, this does not mean asking how CSR can benefit business, but rather how business can benefit society through CSR.

Shifting this perspective to sustainability, the environment is perceived as something external, related to the firm only so far as it affects its utilitarian mission.

How did restoring the pride of place to the natural environment, within which all human activity ultimately takes place, become such an audacious goal? In actuality, much of our discussion can be read as an institutional history of how this predicament materialized. To reorient the field, we ratify the thoughts of Vedula et al.’s (2022) review of social and environmental entrepreneurship research. In a review of 746 articles published from 1994 through 2019, they concluded that “almost none of the papers we reviewed actually measured ultimate social and environmental outcomes” (Vedula et al., 2022: 413; emphasis in original). Our studies have all too frequently considered traditional left-hand side variables, such as profitability and growth, instead of environmental outcomes. And even when we do consider environmental outcomes, our measurements generally assume they are positive. Just to choose one example, several studies have a number of alternative energy projects as a dependent variable, assuming that their installation would reduce carbon emissions. However, none that we are aware of actually demonstrate that this is so, by estimating carbon emissions directly. We believe that a clear path out of the mainstream lies in shifting the dependent variables we study to authentic environmental impacts.

Daring to be Different

Recognizing Core Challenges

In various ways, the articles urge us to reassess our assumptions. Morales-Raya and Muñoz (2024), writing about the proclivity to assign merit to long-term action, argue that the “literature appears to take an ideological stance concerning time preferences in business sustainability” (Morales-Raya & Muñoz, 2024: 279). Assessing the failure of academic research to deter corporate greenwashing, Montgomery et al. (2024: 247) depressingly wonder “where we went wrong”

The boundaries of sustainability research are too narrow for several authors. Foster et al. (2024: 177) put it strongly, asserting a clear “need to deepen engagement with equity and justice in grand challenges scholarship,” for example “prioritizing the goals, perspectives, and neglected voices within environmental conflicts and solutions.” A narrowness of focus is also decried by Lüdeke et al. (2024: 213), who, coming from the more familiar world of business models, nonetheless state that business model research that incorporates sustainability has been “biased toward emphasizing conventional value functions that serve goals of value creation for a limited set of stakeholders and maximization of the share of value captured by the focal organization.” More specifically, and in line with Foster et al.’s call for considering equity more, they also underscore a need for future research on business models for sustainability needs to include social sustainability aspects more frequently.

Indeed, as these calls accumulate, one wonders whether the training received in management PhD programs will equip scholars to address these essential issues. Thus, although the common tensions in these articles reveal what we might expect from a field in the latter stages of its adolescence (Russo & Minto, 2012), we believe they generate an imperative to break out of the confinements that we have inherited from the disciplines and fields that formed the hatchery for sustainability research. What would an agenda to upset the status quo look like? Our first point is that the interdisciplinarity we wrote about above certainly would contribute to this initiative, as well. While this would not imply that we would have to abandon all our methods and terminology, questioning some underlying premises for research in our field in the spirit of Feyerabend (2010) could help to provide novel sandboxes that enable learning and institutional change that improves on our current track record.

Toward Removing Our Blinders

But other elements could contribute to change. Although is true of other research areas in management, we would like to emphasize the value of professional work experience in the sustainability field, broadly defined. Requiring some elements of professional experience would force scholars to test their ideas against the depth of their experiences in the real world. Our position is that this would move us away from the conceptual elegance that characterizes single disciplines and introduce what we might term “productive complications” to calculus. This idea is an important definitional element of transdisciplinarity (Nowotny et al., 2001) and as before, for interdisciplinarity, a key challenge seems to be how to implement this in local practices. Examples of this are suggestions to involve practitioners in the writing of reviews (Sharma & Bansal, 2023) or a call by the incoming editor of the Academy of Management Perspectives to involve practitioners in the journal’s editorial board and review processes.

As well, one wonders what compulsory, meaningful experience in the developing world would do for our scholarship. A professional norm of even a term or two in such a setting would generate enormous benefits. For one, it would bring those cultural differences in values that we talk about so frequently into something confronted daily. In line with our earlier plea for more methodological diversity to support interdisciplinarity, this would further help to loosen up our expectations concerning research methodologies, as scholars would grasp the difficulties of conducting studies in such localities. It might also lead to more space in premier journals for authors in developing countries, both through collaborative efforts but also through learning interactions in such a setting. This again would be an important contribution to more transdisciplinarity in the sense of engaging a wider set of stakeholders to the scientific process. In fact, as is also highlighted in several ways in the reviews in this issue, it would be another step to joint value creation (Freeman et al., 2007) or joint ownership in a research process (Spicer et al., 2021).

Making the Future Possible: Engaged Scholars and Consequential Research

As we synthesized our field’s knowledge by integrating the reviews in this issue, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that modifications (or indeed, transformations) are inescapably essential. What strikes us is not so much the need to maintain momentum; that is not in danger. What is required instead are shifts that will elevate the relevance of our research. Nothing would do so more effectively than for our scholarship to contribute to genuine sustainability solutions.

Academically speaking, we have legitimized the field that joins management, organizations, and sustainability. But we have done so in a way that underscores responsibilities that we have yet to fully act upon: to deepen our engagement with important stakeholders that we have subordinated to date; to truly impact the practice of management; and ultimately, to contribute to the restoration and enhancement of the natural environment. These obligations are an essential part of our conclusions as we consider the state of our field in 2024.

Perhaps our success has softened us, allowing us to move ahead professionally while we remain distant spectators of a distressed natural world and the organizations that occupy it. This begs the question of the identity of the field: who are we and how should we define our academic field? Do we want to fit in, or to integrate alternative perspectives and voices? This is as much a question we need to pose at the field level as it is a question that each of us must answer individually. Doing so also challenges our responsibilities as scholars. Do we want to follow the publication game (however defined at our institution) or should we engage in tense dialogues with neglected stakeholders, promote ideas that might be seen as heresy, and subvert entrenched, taken-for-granted assumptions?

We believe a little discomfort would do us all good, and it might reignite the passion for change that is one of our original, unifying values. A start would be to recognize that, as Delmestri (2023: 159) puts it: “We scholars cannot be other than advocates of certain values and ideals.” As we reframe our academic praxis to embrace intellectual activism, we would do well to recognize “the myriad ways in which people place the power of their ideas in service to social justice” (Contu, 2018, 293, citing Hill Collins, 2013). To us, this is a declaration of optimism, empowering in its recognition that each of us can contribute to this movement by discovering and embarking on our own path toward a productive, sustainable, and just future.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Michael V. Russo

Céline Louche

Marcus Wagner

Notes

Author Biographies

Michael V. Russo is Lundquist Professor of Sustainable Management at the University of Oregon. He studies how the environmental movement influences strategic management, with two special areas of focus: entrepreneurship and the energy field. His articles have appeared in premier journals, including Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Annals, and Strategic Management Journal. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Organization & Environment.Céline Louche is Professor of Business & Society at Waikato Management School, the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Building from organizational, institutional, and strategic perspectives, her research examines the interplay between business and society. It includes topics such as corporate responsibility, sustainable development, business models for sustainability and responsible finance. She is currently Deputy Editor of Business & Society and Associate Editor at Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal.Marcus Wagner is Full Professor of Management, Innovation and Sustainable Business at University of Augsburg, Deputy Editor of Organization & Environment, and member of BETA (University of Strasbourg). He has published in Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Journal of Business Venturing, and Research Policy. He is board member of KUMAS (a sustainability transfer organisation), his university’s international doctoral program in environmental humanities and its interdisciplinary Center for Climate Resilience.

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