The Corporate Sustainability Puzzle: From Additive Frameworks to the Dynamic Sustainability System (DSS)

Abstract

Corporate sustainability research is rich but fragmented where influential frameworks illuminate important aspects of sustainability dynamics, yet they are often used in parallel rather than connected through a shared explanatory logic of change. This paper addresses that corporate sustainability puzzle through a targeted literature review and critical synthesis of a 44‐source clean‐fit subset within a bounded conceptual corpus of 114 contributions organised into five approach families: responsibility taxonomies, strategy‐oriented lenses, maturity and stage models, process‐change perspectives and paradox/tension perspectives. Across these families, this study found that motives are often treated as separable rather than interacting, engagement is more often progressive than reversible, outcomes are under‐specified or weakly integrated and time and context are acknowledged more readily than embedded in the framework's change logic. Building on these findings, the study develops the dynamic sustainability system (DSS), a five‐dimensional, feedback‐driven conceptual architecture linking concurrent and interacting motives, reversible engagement, dual outcome reservoirs, explicit time horizons and internal and external conditioning contexts. The DSS explains how acceleration, plateauing and reversal may emerge in corporate sustainability trajectories and offers a more disciplined basis for longitudinal analysis, future empirical testing and context‐sensitive diagnostic interpretation by scholars, managers and policy actors.