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This paper examines the process through which micro-businesses 'go green'. It builds upon previous studies that have identified the different drivers of this greening process. However, rather than a static focus on specific drivers, the study articulates the evolution of environmental practices over time. The paper uses comparative case studies of six micro-businesses to build a composite sequence analysis that plots the greening process from its roots through to large-scale and ambitious ecological projects. The study identifies three distinct stages that businesses pass through during this greening process. This has important implications for policy-makers and advisors as it was found that the support needed by the businesses changed as they passed through these different stages. In particular, it was found that appropriate support is currently lacking at certain key points of the businesses' greening development. The paper therefore adds to current understanding of small business ecological responsibility by showing how activities and drivers change with the level of engagement. Pointers are provided as to how support can be improved.

This article reports on a study that uses discourse analysis to provide a social constructionist view of growth barriers in micro-level firms. Although barriers to growth have been the subject of prior studies, no study to date has taken a linguistic-based interpretative approach to understand the mechanisms by which such barriers arise. The study is based upon semi-structured interviews with owner-managers of 20 micro-level artisan businesses. The analysis focuses on responses to questions concerning business growth. The analytical reading of these responses highlights references to business control and shows how the way control is discursively constructed influences management practices and in turn impacts on business growth. The findings suggest the need for a better understanding of the complex interrelationship between micro-firm management practices and participants’ lived business reality. The article identifies ways in which growth-barrier constructions arise and points to how they may be overcome through business intervention.

The authors review the use of denial through a complex and unstable crisis: the Deepwater Horizon tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico. Denial is typically viewed as a binary response-"we did not do this"-with a binary intended outcome-"and therefore we are not to blame." The authors argue that this interpretation is overly simplistic. They found that Transocean and Halliburton executed a strategy consisting of distancing and (counter)attack to shift blame, whereas BP pursued a strategy dominated by compassion and ingratiation intermixed with carefully used denial to share blame. This form of blame sharing is a hybrid of denial and acceptance. BP accepted responsibility but argued that others were responsible too. The authors' analysis also shows that deny response options were restricted or relaxed dependent on situational and intertextual context. They find that the tone of the involved parties' releases became significantly more aggressive as the situation developed toward its legal conclusion and as they responded to one another's progressively more hostile releases.We examine the use of denial as a crisis response strategy (CRS) in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon (DH) crisis. Denial has many noted benefits for individuals. It can be a form of self-defense (e.g., Levine and Zigler, 1975), impression management

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