Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 148, 1 April 2017, Pages 866-881
Journal of Cleaner Production

Review
Systems thinking: A review of sustainability management research

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Research on systems thinking and sustainability management is synthesized.

  • Number of articles published per year is found to be increasing.

  • Core theoretical concepts and research themes are discussed.

  • Conceptual basis for future research agenda using systems thinking is proposed.

Abstract

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, social-ecological 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.

Introduction

In order to effectively address pressing societal issues such as climate change, social inequality, unemployment, and ecological degradation, scholars and managers can benefit from an enhanced understanding of the dynamic interactions within and across interconnected systems (Whiteman et al., 2013). Numerous management scholars have long recognized that the complexity of highly interdependent systems necessitates a systems approach, viewing social systems nested within natural systems and recognizing the dependency of business on nature (Gladwin et al., 1995, Marcus et al., 2010, Roome, 2011, Starik and Rands, 1995, Whiteman et al., 2004). Gray (2010, p. 48) posits, “sustainability is a systems-based concept and, environmentally at least, only begins to make any sense at the level of ecosystems and is probably difficult to really conceptualize at anything below planetary and species levels.” Despite these early and regular acknowledgments of the systemic character of sustainability, to date, a literature review of systems thinking as a theoretical lens to better understand sustainability management has not been conducted.

Reviews on sustainability research, of course, exist. However, these tend to focus on traditional management theories, such as the resource-based view, competitive strategy or institutional theory (Bansal and Gao, 2006, Berchicci and King, 2007, Etzion, 2007, Hoffman and Georg, 2012, Russo and Minto, 2012). While valuable, the theoretical perspectives covered in these reviews do not explicitly address the interactions of firms with the social-ecological systems in which they are embedded. In contrast to insights from other disciplines, the current body of literature on corporate sustainability is “linearly focused on firm and industry effects” (Whiteman et al., 2013, p. 310) and lacks radical new insights (Bansal and Gao, 2006). Yet, an understanding of corporate actions in isolation from social-ecological systems is unlikely to address interconnected sustainability challenges (Marcus et al., 2010, Starik and Kanashiro, 2013, Walker et al., 2009, Whiteman et al., 2013). Systems thinking provides an antidote to such silos, as it offers a more holistic lens to examine the role of corporations within social-ecological systems.

Strains of systems thinking prevail in diverse scientific fields. Our review integrates systems perspectives from organization theory on sustainability with insights from systems thinking within ecology. Systems thinking is a way to understand the complexity of economic, social and ecological systems (Holling, 2001). A complex system is a set of interacting variables that behave according to governing mechanisms or forces (Maguire et al., 2006, Maguire et al., 2011, Walker and Salt, 2006). Through the application of systems thinking, sustainability management researchers may be able to “identify the points at which a system is capable of accepting positive change and the points where it is vulnerable” (Holling, 2001, p. 392).

Interdependence between organizations and the natural environment is central to a systemic sustainability management perspective given that organizations depend on the natural environment for inputs and organizational actions directly impact the natural environment through feedback loops (Starik and Kanashiro, 2013, Starik and Rands, 1995). This embedded view of organizations recognizes systemic limits to growth within the boundaries of the planet, finite resources and the dependency of organizations on society, economy and nature (Gladwin et al., 1995, Marcus et al., 2010, Meadows et al., 1972, Rockström et al., 2009, Whiteman et al., 2013, Winn and Pogutz, 2013). This leads us to ask the following question, “What do we know about sustainability management research which leverages a systems thinking theoretical lens?”

In this article, we present a systematic literature review addressing sustainability management from a systems thinking perspective to make sense of what is already known and provide directions for future research. First, we present the systematic review methodology. Second, we provide a descriptive analysis of the articles found in the review. Third, we give an overview of the core concepts and research themes. Fourth, we present an integrated framework of systems thinking and sustainability management. Finally, we discuss the implications for management research and provide directions for future research.

Section snippets

Research methods

To ensure the rigor and quality of our review, the synthesis of the existing research was conducted in a systematic manner with the aim of reducing bias while allowing for flexibility and creativity (Tranfield et al., 2003). We designed our methodological approach based on insights from the stages of a systematic review suggested by Tranfield et al. (2003) and from literature reviews published in peer-reviewed journals (i.e. Aguinis and Glavas, 2012, Crossan and Apaydin, 2010, Fulmer and

Descriptives

From 1990 until 2000, articles published pertaining to systems thinking and sustainability management were limited, averaging less than 1 article published per year (see Fig. 1). Since 2000, the number of articles published per year has increased exponentially with 67 of our 96 reviewed articles becoming available from 2010.

Using citation statistics from SSCI, we present a list of the top 20 cited articles in the review (see Table 3). The top cited articles come from a variety of sources

Research results

We begin by defining sustainability from a systems perspective. Sustainability is a normative concept referring to an ideal state of being in which humans are able to flourish within the ecological thresholds of the planet alongside other living entities for perpetuity (Ehrenfeld, 2012). Sustainability is not an end state that can be achieved, but a ‘moving target’ that is continuously changing and improving (Gaziulusoy et al., 2013). This dynamic state exists within thresholds, defined by the

Integrated framework

We developed an integrated framework to give an overview of the research themes presented in the previous section. The contribution of the framework is to demonstrate to what extent each research theme has addressed cross-scale interactions and where gaps still exist. The bidirectional arrows represents conceptual interdependence between the two levels, or that the higher level system influences the lower level system and vice versa. The article per theme that discusses the broadest

Future research

Systems thinking is increasingly being used to understand sustainability issues in management but remains peripheral to mainstream organizational journals. We hope that the conceptual foundations identified in this review, such as the emerging field using a paradox lens (Hahn et al., 2015, Ven der Byl and Slawinski, 2015) among others, will encourage more scholars in the field of management to understand the complexities of sustainability with systems thinking. Overall, a key implication of our

Conclusion

In 1995, Gladwin et al. called on management scholars to develop theories that reintegrate organizations with the social and ecological systems in which they are embedded. In the same early special issue on sustainability management, Starik and Rands (1995) invited studies that explore the linkages between organizations and all system levels and give insight into the strategies that may lead to overall systemic sustainability.

Our review indicates that many organizational scholars have

Funding

This work was supported by the EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Training Network funding scheme: Innovation for Sustainability (I4S) Grant Agreement n° 316604.

Acknowledgements

We dedicate this article in memory of Nigel Roome. Thank you to Nigel for his support over the years, guidance in this field, compassion and humor. We would also like to thank the reviewers that provided thoughtful feedback and Kate Horton for her time and feedback.

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