Business and Professional Ethics Journal

Volume 28, Issue 1/4, 2009

Subodh P. Kulkarni
Pages 3-26

“Justice as Freedom”
Do We Have a New Approach to a Firm’s Enterprise Strategy?

A firm’s enterprise strategy denotes what a firm stands for. Despite its importance, there has been little research on this topic. Furthermore, the theoretical bases underlying the existing approaches to enterprise strategy suffer from several limitations. In view of these shortcomings, this paper invokes Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach (SCA) and its notion of “justice as freedom” as a normative foundation of enterprise strategy. Toward this end, it integrates different streams in the stakeholder theory/business ethics and economics literature. It focuses on the stakeholder capability of “having a voice,” and the managerial capability of “using the knowledge to provide stakeholders a voice and freedom.”