Structuring the sustainability of corporate digitalization: A review of existing frameworks and recommendations to improve procedural rationality

An increasing number of businesses are strategically aligning efforts to enhance corporate sustainability and digital maturity in parallel. However, to date, there is no overview of existing decision-making frameworks that structure the sustainability impacts of corporate digitalization. This study aims to review existing frameworks, providing an overview of the state of the art, and recommendations for future framework construction. Following PRISMA guidelines, a structured literature review was performed on the Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases, complemented by backwards snowballing. Frameworks were retained that explicitly structure the sustainability of corporate digitalization. These were subsequently characterized and mapped based on their methodological underpinnings and the inclusion of sustainability and business impacts, followed by an evaluation by an independent expert panel. The study demonstrates how a majority of frameworks applied a product- or company-level perspective on the impact of digitalization, leaving out broader ecosystem-level phenomena. Frameworks tend to emphasize economic sustainability factors, focusing on the performance-related impacts of digitalization and neglecting indirect sustainability impacts, such as rebound and induction effects. Moreover, the frameworks contained limited guidance on managing trade-offs between sustainability dimensions. This study applied the theoretical framework of bounded rationality to structure the limitations of current frameworks and provide recommendations to improve the procedural rationality of decision-making for sustainable digitalization. Our findings indicate that future framework development should expand spatial and temporal scales, enhance methodological transparency, incorporate trade-off management, and implement stakeholder participation in both the design and implementation phase.