Abstract
While researchers from many disciplines are increasingly interested in studying issues related to sustainability, few studies have presented a holistic view of sustainability from the perspectives of business and management. This bibliometric study quantitatively analyzed a big data set of 30 years of sustainability research (1990–2019), consisting of 37,322 publications and 1,199,398 cited references, visualizing major topics, dynamic evolution, and emerging development. The decade-by-decade in-depth analysis shows a clear shift from a nearly exclusive focus on economic growth and consumption to all three pillars of sustainability, i.e., economic growth, social development, and environmental protection. Highlighting the differences between United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the popular research topics from academia, our analysis uncovers research gaps and suggests future research directions for sustainability researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
With the diffusions of internet and other technologies, we all have witnessed transformational development in commerce over the last thirty years
Due to the fact that the notion of sustainability is multifaceted, the United Nations charted a total of 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030
Focusing on the large-scale literature from high-quality journals ranked by ABS Academic Journal Guide 2018, our study retrieved sustainability-related articles from Web of Science for analysis and visualization
Summary
With the diffusions of internet and other technologies, we all have witnessed transformational development in commerce over the last thirty years. While major technology-driven companies such as Alibaba Group and Amazon have built gigantic ecosystems, many enterprises have been struggling with intense competition and shrinking market share. What leads to such a great difference? Business people like me are beginning to pay attention to social issues including the environment, taking action and really treating this issue very seriously.”. Such a sustainability-driven perspective has become increasingly popular among business researchers and practitioners. A bibliometric analysis of the literature on sustainability can shed fresh light on the implications of sustainability for modern commerce
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