The Ecosystems Metaphor in Management Education: Challenges and Opportunities for Bridging Disciplines

This essay examines the widespread use of “ecosystem” as a metaphor in management education, arguing that while seemingly illuminating, it creates confusion for students who must reconcile business terminology with natural ecology, ultimately impeding their ability to understand both business sustainability and natural systems. We demonstrate how the term perpetuates potentially harmful misconceptions about both business and ecological systems, hampering progress toward sustainable business practices. By exploring five key areas where business and natural ecosystems fundamentally diverge—embeddedness, adaptation, agency, temporal-spatial scales, and trophic mapping—we show how adopting a social-ecological systems approach can better connect management and ecology. We propose new methods for approaching curriculum design and classroom instruction that can enhance students’ understanding of the natural world and the role that businesses can play in addressing our urgent ecological challenges.