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This paper sets out to investigate the potential contribution of the inter‐disciplinary field of ecological economics to the explanation of the current economic crisis. The root of the crisis is the growing disjuncture between the real economy of production and the paper economy of finance.

The authors trace the epistemological origins of this disjuncture to the myths of economism – a mix of academic, popular and political beliefs that served to explain, rationalise and perpetuate the current economic system.

The authors recommend ending with economism and developing new collective and discursive processes for understanding and engaging with ecological‐economic systems.

The authors embrace the notion of sustainable de‐growth: an equitable and democratic transition to a smaller economy with less production and consumption.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

Regulatory lag is that time between a utility's request for new rates and the granting of the rates by utility commissions. The impact of inflation and regulatory lag is presented. The relationships between regulatory lag, asset life, construction costs and utility return requirements are examined with implications for utility management, shareholders and consumers. Possible solutions to the problem of regulatory lag result. A major conclusion is that regulatory lag causes utility managers to act inefficiently and increase consumer costs to the point where the elimination of regulatory lag would be beneficial to consumers as well as investors.

Keeping up with the abundance of new materials on climate change can be a challenge for selectors of library materials. There is a need for an updated list of recommended titles in the library literature.

An exhaustive literature review was performed on climate change books published within the past four years.

The following is an annotated bibliography of 22 recommended titles focused on climate change that were published within that timeframe.

This will be helpful to librarians seeking to develop or update climate change collections.

This paper aims to better understand how business model innovation (BMI) occurs in the context of sustainable entrepreneurship, emphasizing the dialectical nature of entrepreneurial relationships. To do so, key interdependencies and reciprocal influences between internal/firm-specific and external/environmental factors underlying BMI for sustainability are analysed through co-evolutionary lenses.

A co-evolutionary framework is developed and applied to a longitudinal business model (BM) analysis of 15 Italian widespread hotels, which creatively use historic villages at risk of abandonment to establish their hotels.

Largely influenced by the interplay between internal and external factors, BMI of widespread hotels occurs through multilevel co-adaptations, which are recognised as virtuous by all stakeholders involved. Effective variations of the BM value elements are selected resulting in circular economy practices, which are retained for successful BMI, radical (first) and incremental (thereafter). Knowledge of specific local and multi-local conditions, time awareness and a future-oriented temporal perspective, by both entrepreneurs and policymakers, favour this dynamic.

Developing targeted policies and practices based on increased organisational knowledge supported by indicators can help in selecting and retaining successful variations of BMs appropriately in/with time with positive effects on firms' performance and sustainable development.

This study provides a novel co-evolutionary framework that explicitly links sustainable entrepreneurship and BM concepts in the accommodation sector. It further proposes a dynamic and holistic explanation of BMI for sustainability from which the crucial roles of the time-knowledge binomial and circular practices emerge.

Sustainability has become an important catch‐word in several fields that has stimulated an important body of work on a wide variety of topics ranging from economic development and agricultural production to social equity and biodiversity. Few generalizations can be made about such a diverse body of work. However, one can say with some confidence that this reflection has come about in large part from a sense that certain activities constitute a threat to human well‐being through the destruction of the necessary conditions of human survival. This fact has contributed to a rampant pessimism regarding prospects for the future and a rethinking of the meaning of sustainability in the fields noted above. However, acknowledging that sustainability is a rich concept in current thinking about economy, environment, and ecology does not mean that it is clearly understood. Indeed, the opposite is true. For example, John Pezzey, in a recent World Bank study, identified twenty‐seven definitions of sustainability. Even a summary survey of the work about sustainability shows that the term is a multidimensional concept that comprises of a number of interrelated elements, including ecological, environmental, economic, technological, social, cultural, ethical, and political dimensions.

The purpose of this paper is first, to investigate empirically the plurality of understanding surrounding sustainability held by those working in the business sector, and second, to consider the likelihood of a dialogic accounting that would account for the plurality of perspectives identified.

The subjects of this study are those people actively working to incorporate sustainability within New Zealand business, both business people and their sustainability advisors. Participant’s subjective understanding is investigated using Q methodology, a method used widely by social science researchers to investigate typical views on a particular topic, from an analysis of the order in which participants individually sort a sample of stimuli. In this study, the stimuli were opinion statements.

Five typical understandings of sustainable development were identified, including understandings more usually attributed to business antagonists than business. Conflicts between environment and development are acknowledged by most participants. However, an agonistic debate that will create spaces, practices, and institutions through which marginalised understandings of sustainable development might be addressed and contested, is yet to be established and will not be easy.

The paper contributes to the few empirical investigations of the plurality of understandings of sustainability held by those people working to incorporate sustainability within business. It is further distinguished by the authors attempt to describe divergent beliefs and values, absent from their immediate business context, and absent from any academic priming. The paper also provides an illustrative example of the application of Q methodology, a method not commonly used in accounting research.

Suggests that most managers (other than those in marketing) take the view that too much money is spent on marketing. Adumbrates that the accountant may be able to contribute to improved decision making in marketing with regard to expenditure as an investment outlay rather than current expenses. Stresses, herein, that the concern for accounting is with marketing assets and their intangibility. Discusses further assets, valuation and investment and portrays these with the aid of tables and figures. Sums up by saying that a strong case can be made for recognizing many examples of marketing outlay as investments in assets rather than current operating expenses, showing new light on attitudes towards marketing decision‐making and financial reporting.