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An inexorable pursuit of economic gain has ushered in fashionable, entrepreneurial manoeuvres in the arts. This has led not only to the acceptance of new sectoral categories, such as the creative industries, but also to a form of creative industrialization that encourages additive injections of market logic and notions of entrepreneurial value to an erstwhile dependent culture of the arts. Normative silo-based analyses continue unabated in the gnostic worlds of both the arts and entrepreneurship, with a tendency for the latter to ‘rescue’ the ‘failing’ arts. Application of market logic can, however, ignore the multivalence of entrepreneurship or the rich textures of meaning provided by the arts. It is suggested that a consideration of the centrality of imagination offers insights into different forms of value creation in entrepreneurship and of the creative entrepreneurial dimensions in the arts. A review is presented of how entrepreneurship has positioned itself in the arts and questions are raised about the constraints of a market logic approach. It is argued that such an approach promotes a deficit model of the arts and a stagnant, status quo understanding of entrepreneurship. By exploring various arts movements, such as the Bauhaus project, the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s philosophy and the unique, needs-focussed work of the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, creative latitude can be found in the meaning of entrepreneurship as the mobilization of the resources of imagination.

The current era is characterized by hyperturbulence, population growth, attention to food security, the need to identify sustainable strategies to reduce pollution and poverty, and the disparity between developed and undeveloped economies. These circumstances force a global paradigm shift based on sustainable practices and processes that put people and the environment at the core of each activity, contributing to sustainable, social, and economic development and promoting well-being in the community.

In this spirit, a strong impulse can derive from the practices of Green Technology, considered here as that set of processes aimed at eco-sustainability that acquire undisputed relevance, especially for emerging economies.

This chapter focuses on the role that Green technology practices exert in generating local well-being in the world's fifth-largest country: Brazil. Dynamic growth and effective social policies lifted millions of people out of poverty in the 2000s, even if socio-economic development varies widely across the country. Brazil is a leading global agricultural, minerals, and oil producer. The natural environment represents the primary source of Brazil's development that deserves to be protected and push firms and citizens to find new sustainable solutions based on green policies. Drawing inspiration from a Brazilian case study, this chapter proposes a set of building blocks that foster sustainable business practices in emerging countries.

The chapter is organized as follows: the first part introduces the concept of green technology practices; the second highlights the opportunities of green technologies; the third focuses on a single case study.

This article argues that the financial crisis has brought to the surface a series of dilemmas that have their origins in the declining affluence of the U.S. economy in the late 1960s and 1970s. When growth faltered beginning in the late 1960s, policymakers confronted difficult political choices about how to allocate scarce resources between competing social priorities. Inflation offered a means of avoiding these trade-offs for a time, disguising distributional conflicts and financing an expansive state. But the “solutions” that inflation offered to the end of growth became increasingly dysfunctional over the course of the 1970s, setting the stage for the turn to finance in the U.S. economy. Paradoxically, the turn to finance operated as the functional equivalent of inflation, similarly allowing policymakers to avoid difficult political choices as limits on the nation's prosperity became more constraining. But the turn to finance no more resolved these underlying issues than did inflation, and as a result the recent financial crisis likely augurs the return of distributional politics to center stage in American political and social life.