I will be participating in the 2nd International Conference on CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance, Building New Bridges Between Business & Society, to be held in Nanjing, P.R., China, from July 29 to 31 and hosted by the Nanjing University of Finance and Economics.
My contributions to the conference will be two talks.
One will be a keynote speech on “Entrepreneurship’s Relationship to Corporate Social Responsibility.” An excerpt from my abstract:
“Where does business ethics begin? The Corporate Social Responsibility model of business ethics has been a leading paradigm, but its practitioners typically start the middle of things by taking large firms as representative of business and addressing their ethical issues. That sometimes leads to over-generalizing, e.g., by taking the hierarchical social structure of corporations as their defining trait or to analyzing business in terms of top-down political models.
“Instead, I will argue that business ethics should begin where business begins, which is with entrepreneurship. “We do live in an increasingly entrepreneurial economy. But it has also been true for a long time that most people do not work in mid- to large corporations. Rather, they are sole proprietors, or in a partnership, or in a family firm, or in an entrepreneurial venture. Also, every large corporation began as an entrepreneurial venture.
“So my thesis is that by situating ethics first in an entrepreneurial context, we can better identify the core values, virtues, and vices of business. Then we can address how those ethical issues scale as the business succeeds or fails at growing into large corporation.”
The keynote speech will build upon my journal article, “What Business Ethics Can Learn From Entrepreneurship.”
I’ll also give a talk as part of the regular slate of sessions on “Corruption in Business and Regulation as Solution or Cause.” This is part of a work-in-progress. Abstract:
“In a free market, some individuals will engage in corrupt business activities. One argument for government regulation holds that it reduces the amount of business corruption. Opponents of government regulation respond that free markets have the internal resources to control most business corruption — and that government regulation itself leads to corruption, both more and worse. How do we evaluate these competing arguments about whether corruption is worse in free-market or government-regulation systems? In this essay, l discuss both sides’ arguments and bring to bear upon them the empirical work of this generation’s empirical social science.”