The Ruffin Series of the Society for Business Ethics

Volume 3, 2002

Ethics and Entrepreneurship

Stakeholder Value Equilibration, Disequilibration, and the Entrepreneurial Process

While discovery of error provides personal gain for the entrepreneur, does this process automatically allocate value equitably among all stakeholders? We argue that the entrepreneurial process can be used to generate or maintain an entrepreneur’s personal wealth through the exploitation of a stakeholder group. Thus entrepreneurship can be both an equilibrating and a disequilibrating process and that both the visible hand of government and the decisions of an entrepreneur can speed or slow our movement toward value equilibrium. Speed toward value equilibrium is likely to be important to a victimized stakeholder group and deserves further scholarly attention.