Jun 2026· Business Strategy and the Environment· 0 citations· 54 references
Abstract
The growth‐driven economic paradigm is increasingly criticized for its ecological and social unsustainability, yet organizations remain embedded in systems that structurally depend on growth. This creates a persistent tension between growth dependencies and sustainability aspirations. This study examines how organizations can navigate this tension by identifying the conditions that enable growth moderation while sustaining the provision of goods and services. We conduct a systematic literature review combining keyword searches and snowballing and integrate a descriptive mapping of the field with an inductive content analysis. The mapping reveals a recent, heterogeneous, and critically oriented literature, marked by blind spots in managerial, policy, and institutional perspectives. The inductive analysis identifies and structures 28 enabling conditions across paradigmatic, sectoral, organizational, and actor levels. Building on these findings, we develop a four‐part research agenda that calls for systemic regime‐level analysis, configurational and cross‐level studies, explicit engagement with tensions and trade‐offs, and broader empirical investigation. The study provides a structured foundation for advancing research on organizational growth moderation beyond growth‐dependent models.
Type of the article: Research ArticleAbstractContemporary organizations face mounting pressure to adapt beyond the imperatives of market competition, navigating demands that span digital disruption, sustainability transitions, and systemic institutional change. Despite the centrality of dynamic capabilities as an explanatory framework in strategic management, the literature has predominantly examined them through the lens of competitive advantage, leaving broader organizational and societal applications underexplored. This study addresses that gap by examining how the dynamic capabilities framework is theorized and applied in contexts beyond firm-level competitive advantage. A systematic literature review combined with bibliometric analysis was conducted using Scopus, covering peer-reviewed publications from 1995 to 2025. Three search strings, dynamic capabilities and technology, dynamic capabilities and ambidexterity, and dynamic capabilities and sustainability, yielded 750 articles after applying inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria. VOSviewer was used for keyword co-occurrence mapping and cluster visualization, while qualitative thematic coding was conducted in MAXQDA to deepen interpretation. The analysis identified four structurally interconnected clusters: innovation, digital transformation, technology, and sustainability. The findings suggest that innovation is frequently treated in the literature as a key enactment mechanism of dynamic capabilities, with 691 co-occurrences and 215 overlapping coded segments. Sustainability represented the largest and most rapidly expanding domain, with 352 filtered articles, while technology functioned as an enabling layer rather than a capability in itself. These findings demonstrate that dynamic capabilities are undergoing a substantive reorientation, from performance-centric mechanisms toward integrative governance processes for navigating socio-technical complexity. Organizations should embed dynamic capabilities in innovation routines, digitally supported sensing processes, and sustainability-aligned strategic priorities.
Kristian Pultz Schlosser· Problems and Perspectives in...· 0 citations
The purpose of this study is to examine the complex challenges to sustainability in the built environment and uncover their interlinked causal relationships.
This study applies grey influence network analysis (GINA) and its novel interpretative extension (iGINA) to model, quantify and prioritise the interrelationships among barriers using expert judgements.
The iGINA analysis revealed misaligned stakeholder incentives as the most influential barrier, followed by high initial cost, while technological readiness ranked lowest, challenging tech-centric assumptions.
Expert-driven data limits generalisability, but advances grey systems theory for uncertain, large-scale networks.
This study prioritises realigning incentives via performance-based contracts, green bonds, life cycle costing and regulatory sandboxes − breaking economic barriers for scalable green adoption.
iGINA uncovers feedback loops and leverage points overlooked by traditional methods, offering a blueprint for managers, policymakers and researchers.
Drisya Murali, S. M., R. Raman· Construction Innovation· 0 citations
This paper aims to critique the prevailing linear growth model in hospitality, which is associated with volume-driven expansion, intensive resource use and the externalisation of environmental and social costs. It examines the implications of these practices for environmental sustainability, community stability and economic resilience, and proposes a circular value ecosystem as an alternative framework through which hospitality systems can generate regenerative ecological, social and economic value.
As a critical reflection, the paper uses a conceptual synthesis of literature and theory to interrogate dominant growth assumptions, contrast them with socio-ecological alternatives and develop a regeneration-orientated research and practice agenda, calling for a shift in the underlying logic through which hospitality growth, performance and responsibility are understood.
The paper argues that dominant growth-orientated models misalign with long-term environmental and social goals, and that indicators such as RevPAR and occupancy maximisation fail to capture wider value creation. It develops the Circular Value Ecosystem (CVE) as a regenerative alternative and introduces three novel conceptual metrics, namely, the Regenerative Value Index (RVI), the Resource Circularity Score (RCS) and the Community Embeddedness Ratio (CER), to operationalise multi-capital value creation in hospitality contexts.
It proposes three metrics (regenerative value, resource circularity and community embeddedness) to support strategic decision-making and performance assessment and shows how business models can be reconfigured to operate within environmental limits while strengthening the role of hospitality firms within their local ecosystems.
This paper provides practical tools and guidance for hospitality managers to move beyond incremental sustainability. It introduces clear metrics – such as regenerative value, resource circularity and community embeddedness – that can support performance assessment and strategic decision-making. The findings also outline how business models can be adapted to operate within environmental limits while strengthening the role of hospitality firms as active contributors to their local ecosystems.
This paper offers an original contribution by integrating circular and regenerative thinking into a hospitality-specific framework, underpinned by three novel metrics, that collectively reorients the trajectory of hospitality innovation toward regeneration, circularity and place-based stewardship.
A. Elbaz, I. Salem, Mohamed Gamal Abdel Rasheed et al.· International Journal of Con...· 0 citations
This study critically reviews sustainability accounting's research tensions, unintended consequences and explores ways to align accounting practices with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
The study reviews 283 empirical studies on sustainability accounting published between 2000 and 2024 using a PRISMA systematic strategy and analyses them through co-occurrence network analysis and the Antecedents-Decisions-Outcomes and Theories-Contexts-Methods (ADO-TCM) framework.
The review reveals that sustainability accounting research remains epistemologically fragmented, methodologically conservative and weakly aligned with the SDGs. Existing frameworks often tacitly prioritize financial logics, marginalizing ecological justice, social transformation and externalities in governance. Although themes like circularity, stakeholder governance and technological innovation show promise, they risk instrumentalization without deeper theoretical and educational reforms and standardized metrics. Moreover, the field's regulatory and conceptual structures encourage symbolic compliance, greenwashing, disciplinary silos and exclusion of global south perspectives, ultimately hindering genuine SDGs alignment.
The study draws largely on reputable journals and hence may unintentionally reinforce dominant academic hierarchies, marginalizing diverse epistemologies and voices from underrepresented contexts. These risks narrow critical engagement with sustainability accounting's ideological underpinnings and its alignment with justice, pluralism and the SDGs.
The study calls for interdisciplinary curriculum reform, regulatory pluralism and inclusive standard-setting, highlighting the importance of dialogic accountability through the integration of indigenous knowledge and holistic materiality across policy, practice and education.
The study combines co-occurrence network analysis with ADO-TCM integration to critically reorient sustainability accounting research for advancing SDG-aligned, justice-centered practices.
Cletus Agyenim-Boateng, Sulemana Iddrisu· Journal of Accounting Litera...· 0 citations
The acceleration of transformations in governance systems, organizational designs, and state-market relations in the 2020s has placed organizational intrapreneurship at the heart of adaptive capacities. Despite the rapid growth of research on intrapreneurship, public entrepreneurship, and organizational entrepreneurship, the literature remains fragmented across sectors, levels of analysis, and theoretical traditions. This scoping review synthesizes 61 empirical, conceptual or theoretical studies from 2020s and repositions intrapreneurship as a multilevel governance capacity embedded in evolving institutional dynamics. The synthesis articulates an integrated framework encompassing macro (institutions and governance architectures), meso (leadership and hybrid structures), and micro (professional identity and sensemaking) levels in the public sector. It also formulates a forward-looking agenda that aims to strengthen theoretical cumulativeness, methodological robustness, and the translatability of results into actionable policies and initiatives.
G. Morin, Étienne Charbonneau· Public Administration Quarte...· 0 citations
The purpose of this study is to analyze three Brazilian territories marked by tense relationships between companies and communities, seeking to understand how these ties are constructed over time.
This study adopts an exploratory qualitative approach (Eisenhardt, 1989). From an epistemological standpoint, the study is grounded in an interpretivist perspective (Cunliffe, 2011).
The findings indicate that multi-stakeholder governance is a dynamic process, in which organizational arrangements, power distribution and forms of social value creation are continuously reconfigured over time. The study demonstrates how governance models emerge, evolve and are contested throughout the relationship cycle, thereby influencing the generation of social value.
Although the study does not measure social impact through public policy indicators, its findings engage with key challenges of the 2030 Agenda, particularly sustainable development goals (SDG) 16 (governance, coordination and legitimacy in contexts of institutional fragility), SDG 10 (power asymmetries and the expansion of community participation) and SDG 11 (territorial dynamics and firm–community relationships). Thus, the article provides an analytical foundation for understanding how multi-stakeholder arrangements may enable or constrain more equitable and sustainable responses in Global South territories.
This study makes three contributions to the literature on multi-stakeholder governance (Bridoux & Stoelhorst, 2022) and social value creation (Lazzarini, 2020).
L. Angellotti, M. Gama· RAE: Revista de Administraçã...· 0 citations