Rising temperatures, declining biodiversity, and worsening wildfires, droughts and floods are the tip of a sustainability problems iceberg. These challenges are rooted in complex interrelations between social, economic and ecological systems. Solving them requires interdisciplinary collaboration and knowledge in all three areas. In our article, published in the Journal of Management Studies, we, a group of early career researcher in sustainability management, reflect on the current barriers preventing management scholarship from contributing to the interdisciplinary conversation on these challenges and invite business school leaders to take concrete steps to remove such barriers. We invite anyone interested in making business scholarship and teaching more apt to the task of solving social-ecological challenges, and especially those holding leadership positions within business schools, to read the full article here.

What business schools are (not) doing to address social-ecological global challenges
Managers, employees and management scholars can help solve social-ecological challenges. Toward this, business schools have made strong progress by integrating sustainability into existing management fields and by offering new sustainability courses. However, such fields and courses remain largely disconnected from interdisciplinary conversations on sustainability. The current approach treats sustainability as a context in which to apply existing theories of established management fields. As a result, these discussions are limited to the assumptions, audience, research questions, and methods relevant to each field. We argue that, to contribute to the world’s most pressing challenges, we need to extend our focus and be open to new topics that straddle the social and natural sciences, audiences that involve practitioners and non-social scientists, and new methodologies, such as integrated assessment models, that account for both social and ecological factors.
Yet, structural barriers in business schools, including departmentalization and promotion requirements, prevent us from achieving this vision. Because of these barriers, companies struggle to hire employees with needed sustainability skills, essential for the development of coherent net zero strategies, such as necessary orders of magnitude, ecosystem dynamics, or temporal and material constraints.

What should business schools do?
Business school leaders must remove these barriers by creating an interdisciplinary field of sustainability management in business schools. A field with different evaluation and promotion logics, able to reward real-world impact and collaboration with sustainability practitioners and scholars outside management, especially natural scientists. Such field should complement, and not substitute, the integration of relevant sustainability concepts into existing management fields. Integration is necessary but lacks the systemic view of how existing fields interact with knowledge and practice outside business and business schools.
We early-career researchers are imagining and creating a sustainability management path that combines our management expertise with other fields to generate and teach new knowledge on sustainable business practice. We envision a future in which management scholars use novel methods and ambitious systemic approaches to combine our understanding of organizations and interdisciplinary knowledge of ecosystems and planetary boundaries. We call on business school leaders to act now and create the field of sustainability management.