Social, Environmental and Ethical Enterprise

Richard Blundel

Richard Blundel, Chair of the ISBE conference track, Social, Environmental and Ethical Enterprise (‘SEE’), introduces the main track themes and discusses how it could be further developed in order to respond to contemporary issues.

Entrepreneurship has always had a strong ethical dimension. From the earliest times, there was a recognition that the responsibilities of farmers and business owners extend beyond that of securing immediate benefits for themselves and their families. Over the centuries, a variety of rules, norms and practices were developed that sought to reduce the harmful effects of entrepreneurial activity, and to promote positive outcomes. However, it seems to have been only in the last few decades that ethics and responsibility have become integrated into the mainstream entrepreneurship research agenda. In doing so, the agenda has broadened, raising some important new questions. From an ethical perspective, as George Brenkert (2002: 33) points out, ‘entrepreneurship is not simply about how one creates a business or the workings of the economy. It is far more about how we organise today’s society.’

The ISBE SEE conference track is one attempt to respond to this broader agenda. The reviewing team (Dr Laura Spence, Dr Anja Schaefer, Professor Fergus Lyon and myself), was delighted to receive a record number of quality papers for this year’s conference. The SEE track is divided into three main sub-themes:

•  Social and community enterprise and entrepreneurship
•  Sustainable entrepreneurship and environmental impacts of enterprise
•  Ethics, enterprise and social responsibility

Many of the issues addressed under these sub-themes are attracting increasing attention from policy-makers, practitioners and the wider population. For example, we are particularly interested in the ways that entrepreneurial activity contributes to current social and environmental problems, and how such energies might be redirected towards more socially and environmentally benign purposes. This has direct implications for public policies on climate change mitigation, including efforts to promote a ‘low carbon’ economy. The ‘environmental’ sub-theme is concerned with the pursuit of environmentally-responsible opportunities by mainstream enterprises, the creation of self-consciously ‘eco-preneurial’ ventures, and more radical models that challenge prevailing assumptions about enterprise and growth. Our ‘social’ sub-theme addresses contemporary issues in social and community enterprise, including the tension between maintaining core social aims and continuing to prosper in a highly competitive and turbulent marketplace. Ethics is another important sub-theme. Current topics in this area include the growth of ethical markets and the opportunities these can create in terms of providing services for disadvantaged groups or in facilitating markets in fairly-traded goods and services. 







Micro enterprise manufacturing fuel-efficient ‘Gyapa’ stoves in Ashaiman, Ghana


So what is the future for the SEE track? Having reviewed our sub-themes, it might be reasonable to ask whether we are simply replicating the work of the business ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) tracks that are found at most management conferences and in those of functional specialisms such as marketing and accounting. However, while there are some obvious overlaps, the distinctive feature of this track is its focus on the entrepreneurial dimensions of responsibility. In other words, we are much more interested in how organisations seek to pursue new ‘social’ and ‘environmental’ opportunities, rather than in how they manage existing operations. One of the major challenges for the track, and for the emerging field that it represents, is in developing a more coherent and integrated perspective on the complex and often contentious issues that it addresses. We also need more empirical work, including more reliable indicators of social and environmental performance and more in-depth case studies to explore the underlying mechanisms. I hope you may be able to join us, either by attending the track in London this autumn or by getting in touch directly as we seek to build a stronger research community.

Richard Blundel, Senior Lecturer in Business Enterprise, Open University, r.k.blundel@open.ac.uk

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