SYSTEMS THINKING AND COMPLEXITY THEORY FOR SUSTAINABLE AND RESILIENT MANAGEMENT: AN INTEGRATIVE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Abstract
Sustainability and resilience have both moved to the centre of management scholarship, yet they are usually theorised apart and studied with analytical tools that assume linearity, equilibrium and clean organisational boundaries. This article develops an integrative conceptual framework that reads sustainable and resilient management through two related but distinct traditions of systemic reasoning: systems thinking and complexity theory. Following a theory synthesis design and a transparent, purposive literature protocol, we first separate the two traditions along their intellectual lineages, ontological commitments, characteristic questions and methodological repertoires, and we show where their conflation has weakened management theorising. We then reconstruct sustainability as a cross-scale system property rather than a firm attribute, and resilience as a normatively loaded capacity that must always be specified as resilience of what, to what, and for whom. On that basis we propose five systemic design principles - boundary and scale framing, feedback and delay literacy, threshold and regime sensitivity, diversity with modularity and slack, and polycentric reflexive governance - and articulate seven propositions that connect these principles to sustainable and resilient organisational outcomes. The framework makes explicit a tension that is often assumed away: the capacities that make an organisation resilient in the short run can entrench the very system structures that make it unsustainable in the long run. We close with a methodological agenda that matches systemic constructs to simulation, participatory modelling, longitudinal process and configurational designs, and with implications for managers, accountants and policymakers working in contested resource frontiers.
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