Guest Editors
Tina Dacin, Queen’s University, Tina Dacin
Robin Holt, University of Bristol and University of Kyoto, Robin Holt
Jean Clarke, Emlyon Business School, Jean Clarke
Jaco Lok, Macquarie University, Jaco Lok
Max Ganzin, Macquarie University, Max Ganzin
Background and Special Issue Purpose
This Special Issue (SI) seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of venture creation, opportunity recognition, and stakeholder engagement. It invites scholars to reimagine entrepreneurship as an inherently ethical practice, instead of viewing ethics as a constraint or an afterthought in the pursuit of economic gain. The intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship presents a unique opportunity to rethink and shape new ethical paradigms and foster innovative approaches to the persistent questions of responsibility, justice, and human flourishing. Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as a catalyst for creativity, imagination, and the capacity to disrupt, yet it has also drawn criticism for promoting ideals that valorize self-optimization and commodification (Clarke & Holt, 2010a/b; du Gay, 2004; Jones & Spicer, 2005; Harmeling et al., 2009). The foundational activities of entrepreneurship – venture creation, opportunity enactment, and creative destruction – are themselves inextricably bound to questions of ethics (Dacin et al., 2022; Harris et al.,2009).
At the core of any entrepreneurial act is its willing encounter with, and encouragement of, ‘the other’ - whether this means novel products, new practices, uncertain futures, or transformed habits. From some philosophical perspectives, such as phenomenology, ethical experience also involves engagement with the ‘other,’ coupled with a refusal to confine or transform ‘the other’ to the norm (Hietanen & Sihvonen, 2021; Holt & Yamauchi, 2023). Yet this raises a critical question: if entrepreneurship courts ‘the other,’ does it then corrupt and empty this otherness in the calculated pursuit of economic returns? If ethics entails a life lived alongside difference, then how do entrepreneurial lives compare to those shaped and scripted by the certainty and commitment to principled forms of the good advocated by other philosophical positions, such as deontology? This SI is dedicated to papers investigating this uneasy yet intimate relationship between ethics and entrepreneurship.
Different philosophical perspectives can offer unique insights into the interplay between ethics and entrepreneurship, including virtue ethics, care ethics, pragmatism, capabilities approaches (e.g. Bernacchio et al., 2025: McVea & Dew, 2022; Nussbaum, 2011; Sen, 2005), as well as deontology and phenomenology. Similarly, different schools in entrepreneurship studies, from early traditions in evolutionary economics or trait theory, to more recent perspectives associated with alertness to opportunity, emergence and creativity, and actualization, provide different stimulus for ethicists. While entrepreneurship is often associated with opportunity-seeking and value creation, its concern with seeking support from others, and with growing an organizational form that sustains the livelihood of others, extends its modus operandi beyond economic and industrial narratives of profit, and product- and service innovation (Dacin, Dacin, & Tracey, 2011; Sarasvathy, 2001; Shepherd, 2015). Entrepreneurial ventures are embedded within complex networks of stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, non-human systems, and communities (Mitchell et al.,1997). Navigating these relationships demands ethical judgment that balances competing interests, priorities, and values (Clarke & Holt, 2010a). Unlike managerial decision-making, which tends to rely on established protocols, systems, and formalized structures, entrepreneurial judgment occurs in a context of greater uncertainty and fluidity, where ethical considerations are threaded into the very fabric of entrepreneurial practice (York et al., 2016).
Entrepreneurs must establish trust, negotiate power dynamics, and create shared meaning among diverse stakeholders, all while remaining attuned to the broader societal and environmental implications of their actions (Tracey & Phillips, 2011). They continually navigate competing values, and face unpredictable consequences within ‘spaces of ambiguity,’ where loosened norms make ethical reasoning both precarious and generative (Steyaert & Hjorth, 2006). In such spaces, distinguishing a ‘good reason’ for action from simply ‘a reason to act’ carry significant personal, social and commercial resonance, raising fundamental questions about the nature of ethical responsibility in conditions of flux and uncertainty (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006); about the requirement to follow rules or break them (Hughes, 2022); about the intimacy between the social and ethical commitments inherent in entrepreneurship (Dey & Steyaert, 2016; Hjorth & Holt, 2016; Islam & Greenwood, 2021); and about the relationship between entrepreneurial flourishing and care (Ganzin et al., 2020: Zankl & Grimes, 2024).
If we can still speak of ‘the entrepreneur,’ it is as a figure that challenges the viability of the sovereign self, continually narrating identity through stories of venturing and novelty (Clarke & Holt, 2010b). The entrepreneurial self emerges through an ongoing process of becoming – an engagement with chance, contingency and creative responsiveness. Arguably, no other figure more fully embodies Friedrich Nietzsche’s observation that in contemporary society (his, but perhaps also ours) we are beset by diverse, irreconcilable values, requiring each of us to set our own standards: “Formerly one employed morality for preservation: but nobody wants to preserve any longer, there is nothing to preserve. Therefore, an experimental ethics: to give oneself a goal” (Nietzsche, 1967, §260). The entrepreneur lives out this experimental existence, embracing uncertainty and ‘becoming’ through the act of venturing into the unknown (Hjorth & Holt, 2016), through proffering of alternatives, often oppositional ones (Dodd et al., 2022). This insight invites deeper explorations of both how organizations are formed, and stakeholders are engaged in sustaining what we might call ‘good shape’ – a venture that remains dynamic yet coherent amidst uncertainty and change.
In bringing entrepreneurship and ethics into philosophical dialogue, each field can deepen its appreciation of itself and the other. Entrepreneurship studies can learn from how ethicists have conceptualized difference, authenticity, autonomy, duty, care and recognition. These ethical-philosophical concepts invite a deeper reflection on the responsibilities of entrepreneurs (Zankl & Grimes, 2024) – not only towards stakeholders but towards the wider social and ecological systems in which they operate. In turn, ethical theorists can learn from the entrepreneurship’s philosophical examination of contingency, creativity, and emergent futures that foregrounds fluidity, moral luck, and improvisation (Dey & Steyaert, 2016; Spinosa et al., 1997, Spinosa et al., 2023).
Types of Papers and Suggested Topics
We welcome papers from a wide variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives that build on the intersections of ethics and entrepreneurship, making compelling and innovative contributions through several key themes. These themes include but are not limited to:
• Philosophical Dimensions of Ethics. How do different philosophical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, phenomenology, hermeneutics) inform our understanding of entrepreneurship as an ethical practice? (Bernacchio et al., 2025) How are traditions confirmed or transformed when ethics is viewed through an entrepreneurial lens?
• Phenomenology of the Entrepreneurial Experience. In what sense are entrepreneurial experiences of uncertainty, autonomy, and decision-making ethical, and how does phenomenology illuminate Kierkegaard’s ‘finitude’ of lived reality?
• The Entrepreneur and Ethical Subjectivity. How can ethical theories of ‘subjecthood’, agency, embodiment, and ‘self’ inform understandings of the entrepreneur, and how might post-human ethics further enrich the question ‘Who is the entrepreneur’?
• Ethics and Rule-Breaking. Ethically, what is the connection between following and breaking rules, and how might entrepreneurial theory enrich understandings of this connection?
• Stakeholder Relations and Trust. How do entrepreneurs navigate stakeholder dynamics and trust-building while pursuing ethical objectives and are these forms of trust akin to those envisaged in current ethical theorising (Ramoglou et al., 2023)?
• Entrepreneurship as Inherently Ethical or Unethical. Is entrepreneurship inherently ethical or exploitative, and how can these views inform a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial ethics? How core are ethics to entrepreneurship? (McMullen et al., 2020)
• Entrepreneurship and Technological Mediation. In the digital age of machine protocols, does judgment still matter—and is entrepreneurship a break from, or reinvention of, the network, platform, and stack (Beyes et al., 2020)?
• Ethics, Value, and Entrepreneurial Goals. Can ethical theories of value and worth contribute to the framing of entrepreneurial goals and opportunity?
• Temporal Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Ethics. How do entrepreneurial decisions compare immediate gains with long-term ethical considerations? In what ways does the entrepreneurial relationship to time create unique ethical challenges and opportunities?
Submission Instructions
All submissions must be original, not published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors must follow the Journal of Business Ethics submissions guidelines and format the paper in the JBE style. For more details about the types of manuscripts that will be considered for publication, please see http://www.springer.com/social+sciences/applied+ethics/journal/10551. Papers submitted to this SI cannot subsequently be resubmitted to any of JBE’s sections or to another JBE SI.
Please submit manuscripts through the Editorial Manager® by September 30, 2026. The online submission system will be opened 60 days prior to this submission deadline. Manuscripts will go through a double-blind peer-reviewed process as indicated in JBE’s submissions guidelines. Additional JBE editorial procedures are outlined in Peer Review Policy, Process and Guidance, and Peer Reviewer Selection.
To support the development of high-quality submissions, we will hold a hybrid workshop in the pre-submission stage tied with the Academy of Management conference. This hybrid workshop allows attendance by scholars across regions globally; however, participation in the workshop is not a prerequisite for submitting to the SI.
References
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