Balancing the social, economic and ethical Trilemma: Sustaining an inclusive organization that is perceived to unethical

Abstract

Existing social entrepreneurship (SE) literature discuss the dilemma between social and commercial objectives of SEs and how such organization can overcome challenges arising out of it. However, there is lack of focus on ethical issues related to SEs which arises from the presumption that if an organization is socially oriented, the motivation is likely to be ethically sound; that it is principled, morally justified and ethically legitimate. However, this position is subsequently challenged by scholars who argue that something social is not necessarily ethical and hence there is a need to critically examine ethical issues of SEs similar to any other organization. In this paper, we address the research question, “How do core-stigmatizes social enterprises balances their social, commercial and ethical dimensions?”. We used the process by adopting an inductive case-study approach in this paper. This paper contributes to the field of social entrepreneurship by providing a framework that can help them to balance their social, commercial and ethical dimensions.