Sustainability Management and Social Responsibility

This chapter highlights the importance of studying sustainability management and social responsibility issues from a systems perspective and argues that agent-based computational modelling is a suitable methodology for studying sustainability issues from an interdisciplinary, multilevel systems viewpoint. The chapter presents relevant computational-oriented works in the field of sustainability management, organized according to key research themes derived from the extant literature. The chapter also illustrates representative computational modelling works that focus on studying the adoption of corporate social responsibility practices. It argues that agent-based modelling can be used to capture not only the heterogeneous incentives of stakeholders, as more traditional methodologies have done, but also the intricate relations among such incentives that, additionally, may evolve over time. The chapter concludes by arguing that agent-based modelling can be fully leveraged if it takes into account considerations of intraorganizational dynamics, joint effects of first-order and second-order behavioural change, multilevel aggregation, systems resilience, interdependencies and temporal dynamics of stakeholders’ incentives, organizational structure, and complex forms of the firm–environment relations.