I’m giving a talk tomorrow at the 10th International Conference on Corporate Social Responsibility. My title is “Entrepreneurship and CSR,” CSR being the dominant framework for business ethics for the last half century or so.
CSR is a very flexible vessel into which theoreticians have poured a variety of ethical views, but the major versions involve three assumptions, as indicated by the three words that make up the label:
1. The first word tells us that we are to take corporations, typically mature corporations, as our model of business practice to analyze and prescribe to.
2. The second tells us that the social is our focus.
3. In the literature, responsibility is the most elastic of the three, but this third word usually is cashed out in terms of avoiding harm to others and distribution to others.
I will be presenting a contrasting entrepreneurial concept of business ethics — one that focuses on start-ups and innovative firms, that focuses on individual agents, and that puts self-responsibility, productivity, and trade first.
I will also be arguing, consequently, that CSR is at most a part of business ethics and a derivative part.
My thesis: Business ethics should begin where business begins, and business begins with entrepreneurship.