Social Entrepreneurship, Conscience, and the Common Good

Abstract

The paper argues that a relational understanding of conscience, discernment, and common good can provide basic guidelines for ethical decision-making for social entrepreneurs. It challenges the widespread individualistic vision of an entrepreneur as a natural-born hero who has been called to transform society for others. On the contrary, an entrepreneur can support communication, understanding, and solidarity between social entrepreneurs and the communities they work in. It is these relationships that can make social entrepreneurship truly social and caring. One important illustrative example of genuine social entrepreneurship is the Mondragon Corporation, founded as a co-operative in 1956 in the Basque region in Spain. It is today a network of over 260 companies with more than 80,000 employees in fields such as finance, industry, education, and retail. Despite its size, its values still retain its original co-operative spirit: it does not define itself simply as “a business,” but as a “business-based socio-economic initiative” which values—among other things—democratic organization, the subordination of capital to labor, participatory management, and wage solidarity. Mondragon challenges existing management theories by showing that cooperation and solidarity can be the basis of a successful enterprise.