The Triple Bottom Line: A Critical Review from a Transdisciplinary Perspective

The triple bottom line (TBL) has reformed management discourse by making sustainability part of the business agenda, yet increasingly the TBL has evolved into a proxy for sustainability, often visually depicted as the mutual maximization of economic, social and environmental dimensions. We use a sentiment analysis to show that the extant literature views the TBL favorably and uncritically, with only 8% of academic studies invoking the term negatively. Next, based on extant management literature, we show that two core assumptions underpin the TBL metaphor: win–win and firm‐level sustainability. Then we employ a transdisciplinary comparative analysis to contrast these assumptions with two ecological perspectives: strong sustainability and nested hierarchy. By drawing extensively from the literature of ecologically grounded sciences, our study contributes a critical evaluation of the TBL paradigm of sustainability.