Acknowledging the significant role of organisations in ensuring progress towards CS, there has been a recurring and growing call for corporates to enact their commitments and make a contribution towards the global sustainability agenda (Adu-Yeboah et al. 2023). Studies have explored various facets of CS, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Al Mubarak 2021), CS reporting (Onkila, Mäkelä & Järvenpää 2018), sustainable development (SD) (Wang et al. 2022) and ecological sustainability (Perey & Benn 2015). While a growing body of literature explores organisational responses to the global sustainability agenda, the reality is that CS holds different meanings to different people (Adu-Yeboah et al. 2023; Perey & Benn 2015). This illustrates the existence of conceptual instability and the difficulty associated with translating CS ideals into organisational practice.

In this study, we align with Elkington’s (1998) view of CS as an integrated consideration of social, economic and ecological priorities. This conceptual positioning informs our inclusion of various keywords such as ‘sustainability’, ‘triple bottom-line’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘business sustainability’ as they capture the diverse ways in which the CS phenomenon has been articulated in the literature. Although these concepts commonly address the organisation’s multiple stakeholder obligations (Bansal & Song 2017), they differ in their breadth of application and level of integration, thereby reflecting the conceptual plurality that characterises the field (Meuer, Koelbel & Hoffmann 2019). Given the extent of the paradigmatic change required for CS enactment, it is unsurprising that practitioners describe the journey as complex and frequently report challenges with its implementation (Jungell-Michelsson & Autio 2023; Pálffy & Ablonczy-Mihályka 2024). These implementation challenges are often attributed to confusion associated with trade-off situations and the multiplicity of meanings attached to CS (Chen, Eweje & Kennedy 2021; Linnér & Wibeck 2020), as well as to difficulties embracing the new cognitive frames and lenses necessary for making sustainable decisions (Busch et al. 2020; Hahn et al. 2015).

To address the discrepancy between action and rhetoric associated with the multiplicity of CS interpretations (Al Mubarak 2021), sensemaking offers a viable cognitive approach (Preuss, Fischer & Arora 2024) for exploring CS meaning, which has a bearing on organisations’ CS responses (Govender & Smit 2022; Onkila et al. 2018). Sensemaking is a theoretical framework (Weick 1995, 2020) that enables a close inspection of how practitioners construct and make sense of ambiguous organisational responses to CS issues (Preuss et al. 2024; Williams et al. 2021). It manifests as a continuous process of interpreting and assigning meaning in response to environmental cues (Jungell-Michelsson & Autio 2023). Exploring the contextualised meanings associated with CS is critical to both local and global sustainability agendas (Molloy et al. 2020; Williams et al. 2021). Because of the complexity of CS discussed earlier, human agency is brought to the fore and is considered an essential construct for exploring CS enactment as it drives meaning and CS action (Govender & Smit 2022; Valor, Redondo & Carrero 2025).

In an effort to uncover how CS meanings have been produced, negotiated and incorporated in scholarly discourse, a rigorous research design was utilised and is described in the following research methods section.

A predetermined search strategy was used to seek publications that report on the literature at the intersection of sensemaking and CS. The predetermined strategy used keywords and synonyms combined through Boolean operators. These keywords were identified in line with previous related literature (Pazienza, De Jong & Schoenmaker 2022; Perey 2015). For instance, broad keywords such as ‘sustainability’, ‘triple bottom-line’, ‘sustainable development’ and ‘business sustainability’ were deemed appropriate for describing ‘corporate sustainability’. Meanwhile, terms such as ‘sensegiving’ and ‘sense-making’ were used to conceptualise sensemaking. The delineation to only the provided keywords was determined in cognisance of the database limitations and did not encapsulate all synonyms associated with these main concepts. The search strategy was applied to the title, abstract and keywords to ensure the inclusion of relevant data.

Data were sourced from the reputable Scopus and ScienceDirect databases, which have been previously recognised (Makuyana & Dube 2024; Moosa et al. 2022) for their comprehensive coverage of management studies, as well as their ability ot enable precise data searches through their built-in filters. The use of two databases expanded the scope of the search, which enhanced the comprehensiveness of the review.

Data were gathered specifically from studies within a 10 year range (2014–2024). The database search results were screened for relevance using the inclusion and exclusion criteria in Table 1.

Consistent with previous similar review studies (Makuyana & Dube 2024; Tardin et al. 2024), only peer-reviewed journals were considered, while books, book chapters, dissertations and conference proceedings were excluded. This was done to enhance the objectivity and quality of the output. Journals were considered because of their documented influence as validated sources of knowledge within a field of study (Tipu 2022). The search was further limited to sources written in the English language to eliminate translation complexities. During pretesting, it was established that relevant publications were found within the main disciplines of Business Management, Accounting, Social Sciences and Environmental Sciences. This informed the decision to limit the search to these fields. To ensure the integrity of the process, the search was conducted according to the PRISMA framework (Moher et al. 2009), as depicted in Figure 1.

The database searches yielded 197 records, including 147 articles from Scopus and 50 from ScienceDirect. These studies were downloaded, and 18 duplicate studies were removed prior to screening. Based on the set evaluation criteria, the titles, keywords and abstracts of the remaining 179 articles were screened to ensure their relevance and alignment with the study’s purpose. Seventy-four articles did not mention both required concepts as per the set criteria and were discarded. Finally, the dataset of the remaining 104 articles (presented in Online Appendix 1) was downloaded for further analysis and reporting using VOSViewer (Version 1.1.20, Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University, the Netherlands) and Microsoft Excel (Excel).

Following Galdino et al. (2018)’s approach, key elements of the extracted data were captured in Excel to facilitate the last phase of the review process. This phase involved analysing the data and culminated in reporting the findings. The data were thematically analysed using the six-step thematic analysis process, which entailed data familiarisation, initial code generation, theme development, reviewing themes, defining themes and preparing the report (Braun & Clarke 2006; Naeem et al. 2023). To explore the evolution of the discourse, a performance analysis was conducted to examine the intellectual communities that have shaped the field and trace these developments across journals, regions and time (Moosa et al. 2022). We employed science mapping to assess and visualise the field’s thematic structure, highlighting how thematic trends correspond to the evolving discourse over the period of the review (Akbari et al. 2020).

Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the University of Pretoria Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences Research Ethics Committee (No. EMS042/24).

Analysing how research has evolved and how it relates to each other over the past decade is a challenging task, especially in today’s VUCA environment. Within the scope of this review, early discussions at the nexus of sensemaking and CS began with studies exploring meaning-making in organisational CS endeavours. These studies highlighted how CS sensemaking is influenced by decision makers’ cognitive (Hahn et al. 2014) and normative stances (Alexander, Walker & Naim 2014). Hahn et al. (2014) provide a key conceptual anchor for this field (see Table 2) and remain the most influential work in the dataset. Their study shifted the focus from what firms do to how decision-making in CS unfolds as a cognitive and interpretive process. There was also a noticeable reframing of CS as a sensemaking challenge rather than a compliance exercise.

The literature shows a progression from moral obligation to cognitive interpretation and enactment. Corporate sustainability is no longer viewed only as compliance but as a strategic sensemaking process through which organisations navigate ambiguity and align values with performance and sustainability goals. Building on this foundation, subsequent studies (Van Bommel 2018; Xiao et al. 2019) extended the discussion by examining the paradoxical dilemmas that decision makers face when balancing competing social, economic and environmental priorities. Collectively, these works mark a decisive turn in the literature towards understanding CS as a process of ongoing interpretation and negotiated meaning within organisations.

Beyond citation metrics, the intellectual influence of these studies was traced through thematic linkages in various cited works. The study found that the most cited publications anchor the field’s transition from normative framings of CS to interpretive and cognitive understandings. This interpretive tracing provided early signals of the thematic movements, which are later visualised in the co-occurrence mapping, lending credibility to the identified clusters.

Research on sensemaking and CS has expanded steadily over time, which reflects a deepening engagement with the topic (see Figure 2). This trajectory shows a transparent shift from normative and compliance-oriented approaches towards interpretive perspectives that view CS as a strategic concern for organisational adaptation and survival. Early studies positioned CS primarily as an ethical obligation (Elmes, Mendoza-Abarca & Hersh 2016). More recent work situates CS within strategic and operational contexts, including stakeholder management (Aguinis & Glavas 2019), artificial intelligence (Pan & Nishant 2023) and innovation (Denicolai & Previtali 2023). This progression signals the field’s movement from prescriptive discussions of CS responsibilities to analytical examinations of how organisations construct, interpret and enact CS within their strategic practices. The growth signifies a collective scholarly effort to reposition CS as a strategic practice (Baumgartner & Rauter 2017). Varying conceptual emphases have led to diverse interpretations of CS theorising and enactment examined across various domains, such as sustainable agricultural decision-making (Zanin et al. 2024), sustainability reporting (Onkila et al. 2018), sustainable supply chains (Xiao et al. 2019), climate change (Kawa 2021; Wade & Griffiths 2022), environmental sustainability (Kawa 2021; Perey & Benn 2015) and medical SD (Wang et al. 2022). This variation underscores the importance of examining how meaning is constructed within contexts, rather than assuming a stable or universally shared understanding of CS.

The literature reviewed reflects varying approaches to sensemaking within this field. These approaches give rise to two distinct orientations, namely sensemaking-inspired CS research and sensemaking of CS. This variation carries important theoretical implications in terms of whether one is using sensemaking as an analytical lens and framework or exploring it as a phenomenon of interest.

For instance, Friedrich, Faust and Zscheischler (2023) explored farmers’ sensemaking agency to drive CS transitions, while Elmes et al. (2016) studied the role of food bank leaders in ethical sensemaking around hunger and food-related illnesses. In these studies, sensemaking served as a mechanism through which CS is understood and enacted across contexts. Other studies such as those of Demastus and Landrum (2023) and Molloy et al. (2020) drew upon sensemaking as a framework for explaining CS adoption and performance (Onkila et al. 2018; Reynolds & Holt 2021). These studies explain how CS in organisations manifests, thus making CS the focal point. While these two schools of thought contribute to knowledge at the nexus of sensemaking and CS, they offer varying points of departure, which have significant implications for theory, practice and future research.

Several antecedents emerged as either enabling or constraining CS practice. These are context-specific forces (Dziubaniuk et al. 2024), and their influence differs across domains. Hussain and Malik (2020), for example, used sensemaking to identify factors that support environmental sustainability in supply chains. Similarly, Linnér and Wibeck (2021) showed that societal transformations towards sustainability are driven by education, lifestyle changes, values and leadership. Although these studies revealed multiple drivers for CS, they remain context bound and may or may not be transferable to other settings. Overall, we found that studies fell into two categories: either those that use sensemaking to explain how organisations interpret drivers for CS practice or those that apply sensemaking as a framework to reveal the cognitive and behavioural processes shaping CS responses in the context. This distinction underscores how enablers are both material and interpretive, depending on how organisations construct meaning around CS enactment.

Variations in how CS is understood across regions highlight the contextual nature of sensemaking and the uneven global production of knowledge. Studies in this review imply that CS meaning is variable and contextually bound (Kogi, Kristanto & Cao 2025; Williams et al. 2021). An analysis of the geographical distribution of literature in this review (provided in Figure 3) demonstrates patterns of intellectual leadership shaping the theoretical understanding of literature. The country affiliation of the corresponding authors’ institution is detailed in Figure A1-1 (Online Appendix 1). The map indicates a global spread of publications across the world, featuring representation from nearly all continents – North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. While the publications indicate a global spread of research output, this representation is disproportionate. Most studies stem from developed countries. Precisely, the top six countries leading the knowledge base in this area are the United States of America (USA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia, followed by Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden in fourth position.

Additional insights from Figure 4 highlighted The Journal of Cleaner Production as a prominent contributor to scholarly discourse in this area. This outlet was followed by the MDPI Sustainability Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Strategy and the Environment and Organisation and the Environment. Together, they represent the top five most influential journal outlets in terms of article quantity within the scope of this study. These multidisciplinary journal outlets focus on disseminating research that explores organisational practice and theory in relation to CS. The concentration of articles within these outlets suggests their central role in advancing discourse in CS and underscores the dominant themes identified in this study (see Figure 5).

Although the journal impact factor remains a debated quality indicator (Mahmood 2017; Sullivan et al. 2024), in this study, it was used to interpret publication patterns rather than to rank journals. The concentration of studies in well-established outlets shows how disciplinary communities define and validate credible knowledge on sensemaking and CS (Bansal & Gao 2006; Tipu 2022). This concentration indicates that discourse development is shaped by editorial and theoretical preferences that favour managerial and strategy-oriented framings of CS. These preferences have often been argued to have marginalised the more critical or context-specific perspectives (Hofstetter et al. 2022; Torres-Baumgarten & Rakotobe-Joel 2023).

The review shows that 45% of the studies were published in journals with an impact factor above five, while 20% appeared in journals rated below three. This trend signals growing research at the intersection of sensemaking and CS which appears most frequently in high-impact outlets, mainly from the Global North. These publication patterns are not measures of journal prestige, but indicators of how institutional and disciplinary boundaries influence the evolution of CS sensemaking research (Online Appendix 1). This dominance suggests that much of the theoretical framing in this field continues to reflect perspectives and assumptions rooted in developed contexts. As a result, the voices and realities of organisations in the Global South remain underrepresented, limiting the field’s capacity to capture the diversity of CS meanings and practices across regions (Acosta et al. 2024).

A keyword co-occurrence analysis was conducted using VOSViewer (see Figure 5). This method highlights how topics cluster and shift over time (Mehtaa, Pancholib & Saxena 2024; Soleymanzadeh & Hajipour 2025). Supporting the earlier observations, research in early years emerged as emphasising ethical and compliance perspectives on CS (Alexander et al. 2014; Elmes et al. 2016), whereas recent studies show a shift towards cognitive and behavioural interpretations that position CS as a strategic imperative (Aguinis & Glavas 2019; Pan & Nishant 2023)

The co-occurrence mapping reveals three connected thematic clusters (responsibility, leadership and strategy), which are central to this study’s contribution. These clusters represent the evolving cognitive map in the field and form the empirical base for the framework presented in Figure 6. Our analysis revealed that authors appeared to converge on shared conceptual conversations. For example, ‘ethics’ often co-occurs with ‘corporate responsibility’ and ‘stakeholder’, while ‘leadership’ links with ‘governance’ and ‘transformation’ (Lajnef & Dhifi 2024; Preuss et al. 2024). These linkages confirm the coherence of the three clusters and provide empirical patterns and grounding for the thematic interpretation developed in this study.

The synthesis and critical reflection of thematic and bibliometric findings reveal that sensemaking and CS discourse have evolved over time through interpretive shifts as opposed to linear growth. The shifts reflect how practitioners construct meaning in response to CS priorities while balancing the associated tensions (Hahn et al. 2014; Reynolds & Holt 2021). Evidence from the mapping indicates that sensemaking theory is concentrated within these three interpretive frames of responsibility, leadership and strategy. Each frame reflects distinctive ways organisations make sense of CS demands. Scholarship appears to have often addressed what CS means, but less often described how meaning is enacted in practice. These findings set the stage for the proposed theoretical integration and future research directions.

Having identified various scholarly and conceptual gaps and patterns in our discussion, this section outlines the proposed pathways for future research that could advance our understanding of literature at the nexus of sensemaking and CS. The proposed research directions identify areas where theory development remains incomplete and present opportunities for future studies. The tracing of recurring keywords and author networks as part of the analysis exposed gaps such as the limited integration between leadership and strategy studies. This limits our understanding of how organisational practitioners coordinate sensemaking and decision-making for CS practice. As such, these areas are still under-applied in CS discourse.

Firstly, the pathway for future research focuses on responsibility, reflecting the scarcity of studies linking ethical framing with organisational action. Responsibility addresses how organisations interpret and act on their social and environmental obligations (Lajnef & Dhifi 2024). Keywords such as CSR, ethics, tension and environmental economics highlight ongoing debates about organisational responsibility and its practical enactment (Preuss et al. 2024). Future research that investigates how actors translate ethical meaning into operational routines and governance mechanisms is recommended. Additional studies at the nexus of responsibility and accountability could be valuable in explaining how CS principles shift from rhetoric to implementation.

Secondly, the pathway is leadership, which we acknowledge as central to translating CS intent into practice (Wade & Griffiths 2022). Yet, our findings reveal that leadership studies rarely examine how sensemaking operates across levels, nor do they tend to focus on how individuals and teams shape CS interpretation and enactment. Our choice of keywords revealed insights into how leaders navigate CS challenges and guide organisational transitions. Additional studies could focus on the distributed and collective sensemaking processes in cross-functional or multicultural settings (Linnér & Wibeck 2020). This would offer an improved understanding.

Thirdly, the pathway is strategy, which concerns how organisations enact CS in everyday practice (Johnson, Melin & Whittington 2003). Even though literature has confirmed that strategic approaches enable firms to achieve sustainable competitiveness and operational efficiency, innovation and value creation (Adu-Yeboah et al. 2023; Ofori et al. 2014), strategy-oriented research in Africa is limited; there is a need for further strategy research that focuses on the often overlooked micro-level cognitive processes that support enactment (Eticha, Brunninge & Tessema 2024).

The limited and uneven coverage of diverse contexts that emerged in the study highlights the need for future research in underrepresented regions, particularly Africa. This gap has been noted by various special issue calls for further research that is more inclusive and offers a pluralistic understanding of CS (Acosta et al. 2024; Makuyana & Dube 2024). Extending research to emerging contexts has the potential to deepen theoretical insight through examining how contextual realities shape CS meaning and practice (Kogi et al. 2025; Walls & Vogel 2023). The three pathways of responsibility, leadership and strategy revealed an underlying cognitive structure in CS research and avenues for future research. Studies that explore these will strengthen theoretical integration and contribute by moving the scholarly discussion beyond mapping knowledge to explaining how organisations construct, negotiate and apply the meaning of CS in practice.