Ann Starbæk Bager

Ethics Perspective on Entrepreneurship

Bager, Svane, and Jorgensen, building on Arendt, Butler, and Bakhtin, propose a conceptual framework for understanding ethics in relation to entrepreneurship. The concepts of precarity, action, answerability, and space of appearance are used to conceptualize challenges and possibilities, as well as to problematize current neoliberal discourses concerning entrepreneurship. Their framework seeks to provide some signposts within which the question of entrepreneurial ethics can be located. It is also an alternative way of viewing ethics from the dominant neoliberal ethos; this is an ethics of answerability, action, and pluralism. Through their framework, the authors put the spotlight on what an ethical act is in terms of how it connects to the world but also the space of ethics and what that means in relation to making entrepreneurial ethics more likely.