Short-term versus long-term benefits: balanced sustainability framework and research propositions

Sustainability research has been expanding rapidly during recent decades. Such research takes various forms with the identification of mixed results. Even though there are several review articles on sustainability with valuable insights, the time dimension aspect of sustainability is totally missing in addition to lack of well-developed framework. This paper systematically reviews previous sustainability studies published in the refereed scientific journals for the past two decades to understand the evolution of sustainability issues in the business context and solutions proposed until now. The study categorizes the popular sustainability practices into short- and long-term practices based on the time effect, and link them with different forms of organizational capabilities and sustainability performance. The paper further proposes a two-dimensional sustainability framework that incorporates practices, capabilities and performance, and the balancing issues between short- and long-term sustainability. At the end, it suggests potential research directions for future research as well.