Social Entrepreneurship And Characteristics
The current events in the world political economy call for proper and deeper inspection of the role of business. Are businesses purely for profit motives as Adam Smith
had suggested or can they be modified for social re-engineering and social entrepreneurship? Many are those who argue today that just as Communism and Socialism collapse in the 1980’s with the death of the Soviet Union in 1987, capitalist too as represented by the United State America, Great Britain and Western World is about to collapse.
If such trends are discernible then in the middle course must be mapped out now in order to give the resulting collapse structures some soft landing; and the soft landing is what is known today as “Social Entrepreneurship”. Social Entrepreneurship advocates the new concept of Corporate Community which is vastly different in structures and operations from capitalist business, profit driven organizations as we know them today. Social entrepreneurship is similar to social responsibility in business.
Social Entrepreneurship And Social Responsibility
When Capitalism started it was based on crude and raw laws of Darwinian evolution which preached the theory of survival of the fittest. Biological evolution, led to social evolution, economic evolution and business evolution. The strong and rich shall get strong and richer and the weak and poor shall get poorer and weaker, they said.
That was an anti-God theory. Some even argued (Weber) that capitalism was justified because it was based on the “Mathew Law” of inequality of Gift. Jean Jacques Rousseau in 1759 had warned that man was born free but was everywhere in chains, and called for revolutions. Charles Darwin in 1859 on the other hand argued that there was no need for revolutions; that all we needed was evolution, based on the “Survival of the fittest”, and natural selection.
Spencer had echoed that the rich and strong that the rich and strong nations and strong companies should exploit the weak nations and societies without care or responsibility. Adam Smith argued that the exploitation of the world was a legitimate role for the powerful and might nations. All these led to the “Industrial Revolution” of the 18th century from 1760’s down to the 1960’s.
For 200 years Mechantilistic Capitalism held sway; leading to rapist development as well as exploits which came during the World by the Great Britain, Europe and America. Slave Trade was justified even when the only commodity of trade was human beings. From 1958 until recently Shell Oil Company has operated in Nigeria without a thought on the Communities or the environments from which the oil was taken. Business, globalized or multinationals, was based on what the American business man Vanderbilt had called a “dammed public” that must be exploited or exterminated. That was a “Paradox”, a necrophilia dilemma.