Tina Dacin, Queen's University

Robin Holt, University of Bristol

Jean Clarke, Emlyon Business School

Jaco Lok, Macquarie University

Max Ganzin, Macquarie University

This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of venture creation, opportunity recognition, and stakeholder engagement. It invites scholars to reimagine entrepreneurship as an inherently ethical practice, instead of viewing ethics as a constraint or an afterthought in the pursuit of economic gain. The intersection of ethics and entrepreneurship presents a unique opportunity to rethink and shape new ethical paradigms and foster innovative approaches to the persistent questions of responsibility, justice, and human flourishing. Entrepreneurship is often celebrated as a catalyst for creativity, imagination, and the capacity to disrupt, yet it has also drawn criticism for promoting ideals that valorize self-optimization and commodification. The foundational activities of entrepreneurship – venture creation, opportunity enactment, and creative destruction – are themselves inextricably bound to questions of ethics.

At the core of any entrepreneurial act is its willing encounter with, and encouragement of, 'the other' - whether this means novel products, new practices, uncertain futures, or transformed habits. From some philosophical perspectives, such as phenomenology, ethical experience also involves engagement with the 'other,' coupled with a refusal to confine or transform 'the other' to the norm. Yet this raises a critical question: if entrepreneurship courts 'the other,' does it then corrupt and empty this otherness in the calculated pursuit of economic returns? If ethics entails a life lived alongside difference, then how do entrepreneurial lives compare to those shaped and scripted by the certainty and commitment to principled forms of the good advocated by other philosophical positions, such as deontology? This SI is dedicated to papers investigating this uneasy yet intimate relationship between ethics and entrepreneurship.

Different philosophical perspectives can offer unique insights into the interplay between ethics and entrepreneurship, including virtue ethics, care ethics, pragmatism, capabilities approaches, as well as deontology and phenomenology. Similarly, different schools in entrepreneurship studies, from early traditions in evolutionary economics or trait theory, to more recent perspectives associated with alertness to opportunity, emergence and creativity, and actualization, provide different stimulus for ethicists. While entrepreneurship is often associated with opportunity-seeking and value creation, its concern with seeking support from others, and with growing an organizational form that sustains the livelihood of others, extends its operations beyond economic and industrial narratives of profit, and product- and service innovation.

Entrepreneurial ventures are embedded within complex networks of stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, non-human systems, and communities. Navigating these relationships demands ethical judgment that balances competing interests, priorities, and values. Unlike managerial decision-making, which tends to rely on established protocols, systems, and formalized structures, entrepreneurial judgment occurs in a context of greater uncertainty and fluidity, where ethical considerations are threaded into the very fabric of entrepreneurial practice.

Entrepreneurs must establish trust, negotiate power dynamics, and create shared meaning among diverse stakeholders, all while remaining attuned to the broader societal and environmental implications of their actions. They continually navigate competing values, and face unpredictable consequences within 'spaces of ambiguity,' where loosened norms make ethical reasoning both precarious and generative. In such spaces, distinguishing a 'good reason' for action from simply 'a reason to act' carry significant personal, social and commercial resonance, raising fundamental questions about the nature of ethical responsibility in conditions of flux and uncertainty, about the requirement to follow rules or break them, about the intimacy between the social and ethical commitments inherent in entrepreneurship, and about the relationship between entrepreneurial flourishing and care.

If we can still speak of 'the entrepreneur,' it is as a figure that challenges the viability of the sovereign self, continually narrating identity through stories of venturing and novelty. The entrepreneurial self emerges through an ongoing process of becoming – an engagement with chance, contingency and creative responsiveness. The entrepreneur lives out an experimental existence, embracing uncertainty and 'becoming' through the act of venturing into the unknown, through proffering of alternatives, often oppositional ones. This insight invites deeper explorations of both how organizations are formed, and stakeholders are engaged in sustaining what we might call 'good shape' – a venture that remains dynamic yet coherent amidst uncertainty and change.

In bringing entrepreneurship and ethics into philosophical dialogue, each field can deepen its appreciation of itself and the other. Entrepreneurship studies can learn from how ethicists have conceptualized difference, authenticity, autonomy, duty, care and recognition. These ethical-philosophical concepts invite a deeper reflection on the responsibilities of entrepreneurs – not only towards stakeholders but towards the wider social and ecological systems in which they operate. In turn, ethical theorists can learn from entrepreneurship's philosophical examination of contingency, creativity, and emergent futures that foregrounds fluidity, moral luck, and improvisation.

Potential topics

• Philosophical Dimensions of Ethics: How do different philosophical traditions (e.g., virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, phenomenology, hermeneutics) inform our understanding of entrepreneurship as an ethical practice? How are traditions confirmed or transformed when ethics is viewed through an entrepreneurial lens?
• Phenomenology of the Entrepreneurial Experience: In what sense are entrepreneurial experiences of uncertainty, autonomy, and decision-making ethical, and how does phenomenology illuminate Kierkegaard's 'finitude' of lived reality?
• The Entrepreneur and Ethical Subjectivity: How can ethical theories of 'subjecthood', agency, embodiment, and 'self' inform understandings of the entrepreneur, and how might post-human ethics further enrich the question 'Who is the entrepreneur'?
• Ethics and Rule-Breaking: Ethically, what is the connection between following and breaking rules, and how might entrepreneurial theory enrich understandings of this connection?
• Stakeholder Relations and Trust: How do entrepreneurs navigate stakeholder dynamics and trust-building while pursuing ethical objectives and are these forms of trust akin to those envisaged in current ethical theorising?
• Entrepreneurship as Inherently Ethical or Unethical: Is entrepreneurship inherently ethical or exploitative, and how can these views inform a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurial ethics? How core are ethics to entrepreneurship?
• Entrepreneurship and Technological Mediation: In the digital age of machine protocols, does judgment still matter—and is entrepreneurship a break from, or reinvention of, the network, platform, and stack?
• Ethics, Value, and Entrepreneurial Goals: Can ethical theories of value and worth contribute to the framing of entrepreneurial goals and opportunity?
• Temporal Dimensions of Entrepreneurial Ethics: How do entrepreneurial decisions compare immediate gains with long-term ethical considerations? In what ways does the entrepreneurial relationship to time create unique ethical challenges and opportunities?

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Full paper submission deadline

Pauline Reinecke, Leuphana University Lüneburg

Ignas Bruder, Technische Universität Dresden

Tobias Hahn, Esade Business School

Olga Kokshagina, University of Sydney

Stephanie Schrage, Kiel University

Janina Sundermeier, Freie Universität Berlin

Gender paradoxes emerge from tensions embedded in organizations, where competing expectations generate not only managerial challenges but also fundamental ethical questions about inclusion, equality, and responsibility. While prior research has examined barriers such as the glass ceiling and pay inequality, less attention has been paid to how gender paradoxes subtly yet systematically shape organizational experiences and allocate moral responsibilities among actors.

Gender is approached as an institutionalized system of social practices for constituting people as two significantly different categories, men and women, and organizing social relations of inequality on the basis of that difference. At the same time, the special issue recognizes the lived realities of intersex, non-binary, genderfluid, and other gender-diverse individuals who navigate structures grounded in binary norms.

Paradoxes, defined as contradictory yet interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time, are central to many tensions related to gender in organizations. These include the double bind women leaders face in balancing agentic and communal expectations, the difficulties gender-diverse individuals encounter when resisting dominant norms of professionalism, and the strain between care responsibilities and workplace demands for emotional detachment.

Gender paradoxes raise critical ethical questions: Whose interests are prioritized? Who bears moral and emotional burdens? What responsibilities do organizations, and specifically those organizational members unaffected by exclusion, hold in addressing these tensions? And when do such tensions call for institutional reform rather than individual adaptation? This Special Issue seeks to foreground the ethical dimensions of gender paradoxes in organizations.

The special issue welcomes original contributions that examine gender paradoxes not only analytically but also through ethically grounded normative arguments about how individuals and organizations can and should respond. Submissions should critically engage with ethical questions posed by gender paradoxes such as how moral responsibility is distributed, what burden visibility imposes, and how organizational actions with moral intent may reproduce inequality.

Submissions may tap into a range of theoretical traditions, including paradox, identity, institutional, practice, and discourse theory – as well as normative frameworks such as feminist ethics, ethics of care, virtue ethics, deontological approaches to ethics, and critical management studies. The special issue explicitly welcomes theoretically and methodologically diverse submissions that offer distinct insights into the empirical phenomenon of gender paradoxes, examining how related tensions are generated, navigated, and contested in organizational life.

Potential topics

• Systemic constraints: How ethical commitments to inclusion and equality clash with organizational systems optimized for efficiency – such as standardized evaluations, established management practices, or masculinized leadership norms
• Competing values and moral ambiguity: How ideals such as fairness, meritocracy, and equity create ethical tensions and "tragic choices", where no option is without compromise
• Limits of both/and thinking: How both/and strategies for navigating gender paradoxes can foster more inclusive responses, but may also obscure structural inequalities and shift responsibility to individuals
• Symbolic inclusion and tokenism: How efforts such as diversity targets or flexible work arrangements may produce ethically problematic outcomes, including constrained agency, limited advancement, and superficial change
• Stigma, visibility, and marginalization: How gender-diverse professionals experience and resist stigmatization within organizations, raising ethical questions about who bears the burden of representation

Timeline

• August 31, 2026: Submission deadline

Zuzana Virglerova, Tomas Bata University in Zlín

Nicola Capolupo, San Raffaele Roma University

The aim of this special issue is to explore how algorithmic and behavioral biases influence the adoption, use, and outcomes of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in organizational settings. As AI systems increasingly shape decision-making, human resource management, operational processes, and strategic planning, understanding how biases emerge and interact within socio-technical systems has become a critical scholarly and societal challenge.

The special issue seeks to integrate interdisciplinary perspectives to explain how biases arise both from AI systems and from the human and organizational decisions that design, implement, interpret, and govern them. It offers an original contribution by bridging two research streams that are often treated separately: algorithmic biases embedded in data, models, and computational architectures, and behavioral biases rooted in human cognition, organizational routines, and institutional structures. Building on socio-technical systems theory, AI is conceived as co-constructed by technologies, individuals, and the environments.

The originality of this issue lies in examining the dynamic interplay between technical biases (e.g., biased training data, model opacity, feedback loops) and cognitive and organizational biases (e.g., overconfidence, automation bias, anchoring, resistance to change), and how these interactions shape organizational outcomes. Recent research has emphasized the role of behavioral biases in organizational and entrepreneurial decision-making, highlighting the contextual and institutional moderators of such biases. Emerging work further demonstrates how digital technologies and AI systems interact with managerial cognition and organizational structures, creating hybrid forms of bias that are neither purely human nor purely algorithmic. These insights underscore the need for integrated frameworks and methodologies that capture the socio-technical nature of AI adoption in organizations.

The topicality of this special issue is reinforced by the rapid diffusion of AI across organizational domains, including human resource management and recruitment, decision support systems, circular economy and sustainability models, consumer behavior analytics, and work process automation. Public debates on algorithmic discrimination, opacity, accountability, and the future of work have intensified, highlighting the urgent need for rigorous research on fairness, transparency, and governance in AI-enabled organizations. Furthermore, global regulatory initiatives such as the European AI Act, along with ethical frameworks proposed by international organizations, emphasize the societal relevance of understanding and mitigating bias in AI-driven processes.

Empirical qualitative and quantitative studies are welcome; however, submissions must be based on international data or multi-country contexts and should not be limited to a single national perspective. Literature reviews are welcome if they are systematic or bibliometric in nature; exploratory or narrative metasyntheses will not be accepted. Conceptual papers are also encouraged, only if offering exceptionally strong and innovative theoretical insights.

Potential topics

• Algorithmic biases in AI systems applied to HR and decision-making processes
• Cognitive and behavioral biases of users interacting with AI systems
• Governance, ethics, and regulation of AI in organizations
• Methodologies for identifying and mitigating socio-technical biases in work processes
• Organizational and social impacts of AI on equity, environment, inclusion, and job quality

Timeline

• June 1, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• July 31, 2027: Closing date for manuscripts submission