Humane Entrepreneurship: Theoretical Foundations and Conceptual Development

Abstract

The extant entrepreneurship research has emphasized the development of businesses by recognizing and exploiting new opportunities rather than the development of people in organizations. To remedy this issue, scholars recently suggested the concept of humane entrepreneurship where the traditional view on entrepreneurship is enhanced by the human-centered logic. However, more scholarly work is needed to develop the concept of humane entrepreneurship as a new perspective of the entrepreneurship research domain. In this article, we attempt to enhance the research on humane entrepreneurship by suggesting its theoretical foundations and identifying the underlying dimensions of humane entrepreneurship with empirical data. This study suggests the five disciplines in management studies as theoretical foundations of humane entrepreneurship: strategic entrepreneurship, stakeholder theory, transformational leadership, motivation theory, and humanistic management. Also, we developed the measurement of humane entrepreneurship and tested its reliability and validity by collecting data from 19 countries. The results showed that the concept of humane entrepreneurship is composed of two dimensions, humane and enterprise cycles. Finally, this study provides further research agenda in the domain of humane entrepreneurship research.