ETHICAL AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY OF ENTREPRENEU

The concept of ethics refers to the moral principles and values that generally inform the conduct of individuals. Ethics refers to accepted principles of wrong and right that govern the conduct of a person, the member of a profession or the actions of an organization. Ethics is the determination of what is right and proper or just and fair, by an entrepreneur by undertaking decisions and actions that reflect this (HISRICH AND PETERS) Common examples of unethical actions by a firm or entrepreneur are 1) Theft 2) Falsification 3) Bribery 4) Stealing supplies 5) Manipulating supplies and last but not least are failures to withdraw a defective product from the marketplace. There are some reasons for unethical behaviors. Business seems to take part in unethical behavior for different reasons today than in past. Corporate misdeeds during previous generations resulted from a lack of governmental controls. Some reasons for unethical practices include: 1) A lack of foundation in ethics 2) Poor leadership 3) Need to meet high targets 4) Company politics 5) Work hours and work load. Now come to the definition of social responsibility. It refers to the ideas that businesses and business people should take the social consequence of economic actions in to the account when making business decision and that there should be a presumption in favor of decisions that have both economic and good social consequences. It refers to a business and business people having healthy concerns about the society in which they operate. Entrepreneurship is about risk taking, creativity, independence and reward. The life of entrepreneur is not easy. An entrepreneur must take risks with his or her own capital to sell and deliver the products and services while spending more time and energy than the average business person to innovate. And entrepreneur should establish a balance between ethical experiences, economic budget and social responsibility. In some organization, managers follow those rules and regulations which are already set by organization top management. They used to follow professional code of ethics and laws which they perceived through organization climate. Entrepreneur tend to depend on their own personal value systems much more than other managers do when determining ethically appropriate course of action. As compared to managers, entrepreneurs pay more attention to their peer pressure and general social norms in the community as well as pressures from their competitors. The difference between entrepreneur in different types of communities and in different countries reflect to some extent the general norms and values of the communities and countries involved. The concepts of culture and ethics are somewhat similar. Whereas ethics refers to the study of whatever is right and good for humans, whereas business ethics concerns itself with the investigation of business practices in light of human values.

A common question in business ethics is For whose benefit and at whose expense should the organization be managed? In addressing this question we focus on the means of ensuring that the resources are deployed fairly between the firm and its stakeholders, the people who have a vested interest in the firm, including employees, customers, suppliers and society itself. Entrepreneurship can play a role in the fair deployment of resources to alleviate the exploitation of certain stakeholders. Most of us can think of examples of firms that have benefited financially because their managers have exploited certain stakeholders, receiving more value from them than they supply in return. This exploitation of a stakeholder group can represent an opportunity for an entrepreneur to more fairly and more efficiently redeploy the resources of the exploited stakeholder. Simply stated, where current prices do not reflect the value of a stakeholders resources, an entrepreneur who discovers the discrepancy can enter the market to capture profit. In this way the entrepreneurial process acts as mechanism to ensure a fair and efficient system for deploying the resources of a victimized stakeholder to a use where value supplied and received is equilibrated.