Deignan Award of Responsible Entrepreneurship : exploring the ethical underpinnings of a proposed award in the context of the United Nations sustainability goals

Abstract

The article discusses a proposed "Deignan Award for Responsible Entrepreneurship", "DARE," by examining the economic theory and empirical methods, with a special attention to the ethical presuppositions, underpinning DARE. Given the overall focus on the achievement of the UN Sustainability Goals, the article argues that Compliance based administrative approaches need to be supplemented with intrinsic motivation through awards like DARE. These offer incentives for businesspeople and key stakeholders to freely embrace and compete for the achievement of the UN Sustainability goals as well as to maintain a focus on the genuine meaning of core issues of Responsible Entrepreneurship. This approach maintains the importance of compliance but argues that it needs to be supplemented by intrinsic motivation which may be especially relevant in an Asian Confucian context where "walking the talk" and setting the tone from the top play a decisive role within strictly hierarchical settings, prone to widespread corruption. Awards like DARE may in fact play a modest but significant role in shaping a new economic paradigm oriented towards the common good, contrasted with a reductive model of economics and finance focused exclusively on profit maximization, economic growth, monetary rewards, and cost cutting, coupled with a questionable rhetoric about Corporate Social Responsibility which may easily be abused as a tool for PR unfettered by either proper oversight or mechanisms supporting transparency.