Management studies on corporate sustainability practices have grown considerably. The field now has significant knowledge of sustainability issues that are firm and industry focused. However, complex ecological problems are increasing, not decreasing. In this paper, we argue that it is time for corporate sustainability scholars to reconsider the ecological and systemic foundations for sustainability, and to integrate our work more closely with the natural sciences. To address this, our paper introduces a new development in the natural sciences – the delineation of nine ‘Planetary Boundaries’ which govern life as we know it. We call for more systemic research that measures the impact of companies on boundary processes that are at, or possibly beyond, three threshold points – climate change, the global nitrogen cycle, and rate of biodiversity loss – and closing in on others. We also discuss practical implications of the Planetary Boundaries framework for corporate sustainability, including governance and institutional challenges.

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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, socialecological 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.

Integrated reporting has fast emerged as a new accounting practice to help firms understand how they create value and be able to effectively communicate this to external stakeholders. While insightful experiences from the early-adopters of integrated reporting start to accumulate, the development of the field and how integrated reporting may be successfully implemented remains challenging and contested. Several issues are still controversial with no consensus reached on the central purpose about integrated reporting. This paper relies upon a qualitative approach to accomplish two objectives. First, we provide a review of the embryonic academic literature in the integrated reporting field in order to summarize extant knowledge. Second, in response to a gap in the literature on managerial perceptions concerning integrated reporting, we present the sensemaking approaches of three key experts impacting integrated reporting practices at the global level using semi-structured interviews. Our findings suggest that experts perceive the field to be fragmented and believe that most companies currently have weak understanding of the business value of integrated reporting. The experts give insights into how they perceive the field to be progressing despite challenges and on where they see improvements in the diffusion of practices in integrated reporting. Our study contributes to this special issue by reframing the existing implementation challenges of integrated reporting into promising and inclusive research opportunities that align the priorities of both academia and business.

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