Exploring meanings and the self of ethical entrepreneurs: a case of corporate community engagement within the SMEs in UK

The study has discovered that apart from actual self and ideal self that are crucial to help an entrepreneur to develop a sense of moral affecting ethical business decisions, the social self and moral identity should be emphasised during their self-development and entrepreneurial learning processes. From this standpoint, it extends the characteristics of entrepreneurs and their cognitive thinking to be included moral identity (e.g. fairness, caring, giving, trustworthiness, and honesty) and the social self (e.g. complying with social standards, culture, and inclusion into society). This sheds some light to new frontiers of entrepreneurial moral psychology. It goes beyond philanthropy where enterprises and entrepreneurs are socially responsible agent, namely ethical corporate citizenship. Hence, this study has brought entrepreneurship research closer to ethics in addition to the extant literature. The remaining work (phrase two) will be exploring further in this study to examine the mechanisms and processes of mora self, moral salience, and ethically corporate community engagement.