Connecting Ecological Science and Management Theory

Management theory and ecological research very rarely meet. Two papers by Stefano Pogutz, Researcher at the Department of Management and Technology, and co-authors aim to bridge this gap by providing a theoretical foundation for better integrating complexities of ecological and social systems into managerial and organizational strategies.

"The question is, are managerial theories really able to address these challenges of sustainability theories? It's like wearing the wrong set of glasses and you can't see things properly," said Pogutz, who began this stream of research in 2013. Pogutz said he started reading scientific journals on nature during a sabbatical in Barcelona, and "a light went on." Since then, he has been trying "to permeate managerial theory with these ideas, to equip managers with a more consistent capacity to view phenomena and to give them some tools and some channels to incorporate knowledge."

In the first paper "Understanding Nature and Organizations as Linked Social-Ecological Systems: Expanding the Foundations of Management Research for Sustainability," Pogutz and co-author Monica Winn draw on research on social and ecological system from the natural science-based fields of ecology to expand current knowledge and call for a broader systems perspective in organizational studies. Despite major inroads, complex systems theories have found relatively little traction in management studies to date – in part due to different languages and concepts, in part due to very different foundational assumptions. The paper develops a conceptual framework of seven first- and two second-order properties of social-ecological systems more familiar to management researchers, namely system resilience and adaptive capacity.

Managers in companies in the agriculture, energy, forestry and tourism sectors should adopt advances in ecological science that map the complex interactions of the natural world directly into their theoretical models, argues Pogutz.

In "Paving the Way for Social Innovation: New Conceptual Foundations for Organizations and Nature Research," Pogutz, Winn and Saeed Rahman (University of Fraser Valley) call for more research into understanding the relationship between organizations and functional ecosystems. Much of the literature on organizations and the natural environment since the mid-1990s focuses on how organizations can reduce their adverse impacts on natural systems. "Far less work guides managers on how to respond to the massive effects of changes in nature and ecosystem functioning on their business," the paper says.