Thinking With, Not Just About, Nature: Reimagining the Business–Nature Relationship

Business scholarship has long engaged with the natural environment, yet it rarely pauses to examine what is meant by nature itself. Most research reflects an atomistic orientation that fragments nature into measurable categories, such as carbon, water, and biodiversity, rendering it legible but stripped of interdependence, relationality, and deeper meaning. In response, in this perspective we advance an emerging holistic orientation to business–nature relations that reconceives organizations as ecologically embedded participants rather than external managers of nature. We contrast these orientations based on five dimensions: underlying logic , ethical framing , scope of responsibility , core proxies , and managerial responses . We then offer several promising avenues for future research to advance a holistic orientation grouped around three domains: worldviews, governance, and operations. Ultimately, we urge management scholars to think with, not merely about, nature, treating ecological complexity as a source of theoretical renewal, ethical reflection, and collective flourishing.