All-Academy Theme Symposium

SYSTEMS & SUSTAINABILITY: TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH AGENDA

Sunday, Aug 6 2017 12:15PM – 1:45PM
at Hyatt Regency Atlanta in Techwood
http://my.aom.org/program2017/SessionDetails.aspx?sid=12568

The overall aim of the symposium is to introduce system perspectives to a wide audience and to use business sustainability as an illustrative context for how the application of systems thinking needs to be strengthened in management research. Business sustainability provides a meaningful context, because early sustainability research was grounded in systems thinking and stressed the need to apply a systems paradigm. But business sustainability research has primarily analyzed individual system components and their interdependencies. Instead of addressing complex sustainability phenomena, the main emphasis has been on improving organizational performance and understanding institutional conditions. Therefore, we invite leading scholars from different disciplines to discuss questions such as why systems theory is not as popular is it used to be in (business) sustainability research and work towards the corner posts of a future research agenda at the interface of systems and sustainability research.

PANELISTS
Jochen Markard, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, ETH
Raghu Garud, Pennsylvania State U.
Gail Whiteman, Erasmus U. Rotterdam
Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School
David R. Keith, MIT Sloan School of Management
Terry B. Porter, U. of Maine
Benyamin Bergmann Lichtenstein, U. of Massachusetts, Boston

ORGANIZERS
Sylvia Grewatsch, Ivey Business School, Western U., sgrewatsch@ivey.ca 
Christina Bidmon, Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences, Aarhus U., chb@mgmt.au.dk