ABSTRACT
Zeitgeist A German term meaning literally ‘spirit of the times’. It is used to denote the prevailing social and political mood of an era, the conventional wisdom, the fads and fashions in everything from hair length to management. A Zeitgeist affects the emotional and mental life of everyone who lives through it, and is thought to have similar effects on people of a similar age GROUP, thus providing one basis for generational differences. (See Figure 39.) zero-based budgeting The use of BUDGETS which start from a present base of zero and regard all future expenditure as being on new items rather than a continuation of existing ones. In PRACTICE this means that a budget has to be justified in full for each year of operation. This is a widely used technique of ACCOUNTING that originated in the United States.
