The Triple Bottom Line: A Critical Review from a Transdisciplinary Perspective
Ozgur Isil and
Michael T. Hernke
Business Strategy and the Environment, 2017, vol. 26, issue 8, 1235-1251
Abstract:
The triple bottom line (TBL) has reformed management discourse by making sustainability part of the business agenda, yet increasingly the TBL has evolved into a proxy for sustainability, often visually depicted as the mutual maximization of economic, social and environmental dimensions. We use a sentiment analysis to show that the extant literature views the TBL favorably and uncritically, with only 8% of academic studies invoking the term negatively. Next, based on extant management literature, we show that two core assumptions underpin the TBL metaphor: win–win and firm‐level sustainability. Then we employ a transdisciplinary comparative analysis to contrast these assumptions with two ecological perspectives: strong sustainability and nested hierarchy. By drawing extensively from the literature of ecologically grounded sciences, our study contributes a critical evaluation of the TBL paradigm of sustainability.
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.1982
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:bstrat:v:26:y:2017:i:8:p:1235-1251
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://onlinelibrary ... 1002/(ISSN)1099-0836
Access Statistics for this article
Business Strategy and the Environment is currently edited by Richard Welford
More articles in Business Strategy and the Environment from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().