DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.02.002

Summary
The authors conducted a review of the systems thinking and sustainability management literature from 1990 up to 2015, including 96 articles to address the gap in the field of systems thinking in the context of sustainability management research. They found that a multidisciplinary systemic lens is necessary to understand the interconnectivity of economic, political, social, and ecological issues across temporal and spatial dimensions. The review shows that an emerging body of work has rapidly grown since 2011, but a systemic approach is not yet prevalent in mainstream management journals.
The authors identify and describe the core theoretical concepts of systems thinking found in the literature, including interconnections, feedbacks, adaptive capacity, emergence, and self-organization. They also found several research themes, including behavioral change, leadership, innovation, industrial ecology, social-ecological systems, transitions management, paradigm shifts, and sustainability education.
Finally, they offer a cross-scale integrated framework of their findings and conclude by identifying a number of promising research opportunities. The review suggests that sustainability management research needs to adopt a more holistic and systems-thinking approach to understand the complex interrelationships among economic, social, and ecological systems. This requires researchers to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and to embrace a transdisciplinary approach that integrates different perspectives and knowledge domains.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
This paper revises 96 papers from a wide range of disciplines and perspectives to evaluate how the systems thinking approach is used to unravel sustainability's high complexities.

Point of Strength
The paper offers an interesting framework of systems thinking as a theoretical lens to understand the concept of sustainability better. In this paper, students find descriptions of systems thinking's core theoretical concepts, including interconnections, feedback, adaptive capacity, emergence, and self-organization. Furthermore, this paper is a useful example to understand a systematic method for conducting a specific theme review.