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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Systems Thinking and Sustainability in Organisations

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This set of articles arises from a series of conferences (Business Systems Laboratory Symposia, 2013-2015) and in particular from the 2nd Business systems Laboratory International Symposium, Rome 2014 with the theme ‘Systems Thinking for a Sustainable Economy’, concerned with systems thinking and its relations with sustainable management, where the relevance of systems thinking was demonstrated. The current period of our global society is characterised by intense transformations in the competitive logics of organisations, markets, and, generally speaking, society. Social circumstances today are typified by dynamism, connectivity, nonlinearity, and emergent properties — in other words by ‘complexity’ (Dominici, 2012). The ongoing rapid changes of our times have undermined the concept of alleged stability of the social and business context, causing a boost in all three factors of complexity: economic, technical, and socio-psychological (Dominici & Palumbo, 2013). Economic complexity refers to the changing of relations among business players; technical complexity encompasses the drive towards more flexible technologies; and socio-psychological complexity refers to the social behaviour of the consumer (Dominici & Palumbo, 2013). These factors need to deal with the larger system of the whole ecosystem, in order to avoid compromising the ability of future generations to benefit from systemic improvements. In other words, any change, improvement, or development of a social system has to be valuable in the long term, hence it must be ‘sustainable’. This special issue brings together research articles presented in their preliminary version at the Second BSLab International Symposium in Roma 2014, which address, through different methodological approaches, the timely topic of decision support for sustainable management. These articles present interdisciplinary work that does not aim for the ‘one size fits all’ solution. Given the broad scope of application for sustainability management, this special issue addresses the remarkable open perspective of finding new ways to improve decision support tools and methods for sustainability management. For this special edition we chose four articles (coming from research presented at the BSLab Symposium 2014) considering different approaches and some of their applications to sustainability in organisations. In the first article, Karin Brunsson points out that sustainability relates to ethics, and individuals and organisations should follow different ethical standards. The author argues that, if individuals adopt an organisational kind of ethics then global