Conceptualising post‐growth to advance corporate sustainability research: A comparative literature review

Abstract

This comparative literature review explores how an expanding body of interdisciplinary post‐growth literature aligns, extends or challenges ecocentric Corporate Sustainability ( e CS) research in management (i.e., rooted in systems thinking, emphasising planetary boundaries, ecological limits and embeddedness). From a sample of e CS literature, we inductively extracted four recurring theoretical dimensions: Place, Resources, Scale and Time. We then systematically compared how e CS research and post‐growth scholarship approach these dimensions. Our results suggest that although the two literatures share the same intellectual foundations grounded in ecological realism (i.e., natural science insights about biophysical limits and their implications for human organising), they diverge significantly in that the post‐growth literature has drawn out the political–economic implications of such ecological realism more explicitly than e CS (e.g., challenging neoclassical economic principles; paying more attention to the requisites for political and structural change; and embracing experimentation with alternative organising). We elaborate on the implications of such divergences, from which we propose future research directions towards post‐growth‐oriented CS, that is, a synthesis that combines e CS's engagement with firm‐level organising and post‐growth's institutional, political and economic critique of growth imperatives.