Multidisciplinary approaches to sustainabilty

Sustainability has been getting attention in theory and practice particularly for the last two decades. It can be easily seen that using sustainability as a term in books increased after 1987 according to the search results in the Google Ngram Viewer. In this year the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) published its Brutland Report entitled "Our common future". The report seems affected researchers in this field. When doing the same search for the dimensions of sustainability, it can be clearly seen that while the ecological and environmental sustainability dimension is the most emphasized, the social sustainability is the least emphasized dimension in books. When we performed the same search via Scopus subject database, "Business, management and accounting" and "Economics, econometrics and finance" subject areas constitute approximately 21% while social sciences (27.4%), engineering (20.7%), energy (11.7%) and environmental sciences (32.2%). The same search also showed that environmental sustainability concept is quite dominant in the book literature compared to the social and economic sustainability.