Social Entrepreneurship: ProspActive Responsibility for a Better Society

This contribution to the discussion about the social responsibilities of business does not start, like conventional efforts in this field, with the role of business in society and then ask about the issue of social responsibility. Rather, the starting point is the concept of (social) responsibility and its particular importance and meaning in modern western societies. The reasons for this approach lie in the changing conditions of agency in complex societies, where the characteristics of pluralism, and radical uncertainty in particular, provoke a new, or at least a modified, understanding of responsibility. In this paper, I attempt to determine why, and to what extent, the dynamics and diversity of 21st century societies make classic understandings of responsibility less relevant by unveiling certain contradictions and paradoxes. In order to deal with these issues in a constructive way, I propose a particular meaning of responsibility, which I call prospactive responsibility, whose main features are its future orientation (prospective) and its agent orientation (active). This implies a conception of future states as well as the question of how and where to locate them. By discussing whether the answer could be the common good of society, I will come up with a practice-and movements-based suggestion that is related to civil society as the better (not the good) society. In order to prove that the developed concept is not merely a theoretical idea, I will discuss the emerging field of social entrepreneurship as the business (or social) case for prospactive responsibility.