Is Sustainable Strategy a Thing?

Abstract

This paper investigates the degree of integration of modern conceptions of sustainability in strategy research over time with a bibliometric network analysis based on co-citation linkages over articles intersecting strategy and sustainability research. The findings display a comprehensive retrospective of the evolution of the intellectual structure of the sustainable strategy research space from a split between environmental and social aspects focused on firm and financial performance, to an increasingly specialized but fragmented field losing focus in central strategy research. The discussion identifies potential challenges of several assumptions underlying the contemporary theoretical approaches to strategy research in view of the increasing practical relevance of sustainability and proposes a research agenda for addressing these challenges.