Inter-disciplinary perspectives on sustainability in machinery manufacturing

Perspectives on economic, social, and environmental sustainability in machinery manufacturing are changing. These are predominantly driven by increased consumer, firm, and public knowledge on the importance of sustainability and the role that machinery manufacturers can play to achieve sustainability outcomes. A maturing stream of research has emerged examining economic, social, and environmental sustainability strategies of machinery manufacturers. However, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the extant literature synthesizing the current state of knowledge and postulating future research directions from an inter-disciplinary perspective. This paper addresses this gap by utilizing a systematic literature review approach from the business and management & engineering disciplines. Based on our analysis of 44 articles in this line of literature from 2004 until 2025, first, we examine the major debates in each discipline and the theoretical underpinnings utilized in the literature. Our findings indicate that most of the machinery manufacturing research in both disciplines primarily focuses on economic and environmental sustainability to the detriment of social sustainability. Second, we propose a boundary-spanning framework based on theoretical insights from the resource-based theory and systems theory to investigate sustainability in machinery manufacturing. Third, we present intra- and inter-disciplinary research agendas on sustainability in machinery manufacturing.