To enable corporations to bring about more responsible business practices, changes in the wider system within which businesses operate – including the mental models through which sustainability is understood in the management field – are necessary. Drawing on functioning principles in natural ecosystems – as embodied in circular economy thinking – this conceptual article proposes some constructs to inform the development of a sustainability management theory. We show that the potential for the circular economy to provide a sounder basis to sustainable management theory rests on its capacity to propose a socio‐eco‐systemic framework, which overcomes the separation between man and nature and is isomorphic to the conception proposed by the emerging complexity paradigm. Also, we show that, by imagining a new cognitive framework and evaluating the current linear model and the alternative circular model from a moral standpoint, the circular economy can be thought of as an exercise in moral imagination.

中文翻译：

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循环经济原则作为可持续发展管理理论的基础：系统思维和道德想象方法

为了使企业能够实现更负责任的商业实践，有必要改变企业运营的更广泛的系统，包括在管理领域理解可持续发展的思维模式。这篇概念性文章借鉴自然生态系统的功能原理（体现在循环经济思维中）提出了一些构建，为可持续管理理论的发展提供信息。我们表明，循环经济为可持续管理理论提供更健全基础的潜力取决于其提出社会生态系统框架的能力，该框架克服了人与自然之间的分离，并且与新兴经济体提出的概念同构。复杂性范式。此外，我们还表明，通过想象一个新的认知框架并从道德的角度评估当前的线性模型和替代循环模型，循环经济可以被认为是道德想象力的练习。