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The underlying concepts or beliefs people hold about work were studied by first developing a conceptual framework consisting of five different belief systems. The framework was operationalized by developing a questionnaire that used individual belief statements as items in a S-point, Likert-type format. The subjects surveyed were 340 blue-collar and white-collar workers from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area and 72 union leaders and 366 top managers from the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, area. Subsequent multivariate analysis revealed that differences in beliefs exist in relation to job or position, age, sex, race, and education. Top management is not in favor of participative management structures ; young people are more work ethic oriented than other age groups. Females and blacks show strong feelings of being exploited. Education is related to a weakened commitment to traditional beliefs and to the organization.

Atomic individualism is embedded in most definitions of stakeholder theory, and as a result, stakeholders are not integral to the basic identity of the corporation which is considered to be independent of, and separate from, its stakeholders. Feminist theory has been suggested as a way of developing a more relational view of the corporation and its stakeholders, but it lacks a systematically developed conceptual framework for undergirding its own insights. Pragmatic philosophy is offered as a way of providing this theoretical undergirding for . a relational understanding of the firm and its stakeholders.

At the heart of entrepreneurship are imagination, creativity, novelty, and sensitivity. It takes these qualities to develop a new product or service and bring it to market, to envision the possible impacts a new product may make and come up with novel and creative solutions to problems that may arise. These qualities go to make up what could be called the spirit of entrepreneurship, a spirit that involves the ability to handle the experimental nature of entrepreunerial activity. These same qualities are crucial for moral decision making, and an ethical approach which emphasizes imagination, creativity, and has an experimental thrust is much better adapted to the entrepreneurial activity and much more relevant to the unique situations that entrepreneurs face. In this sense, the process approach to ethics developed in this article is a unifying framework that brings together the activity of entrepreneurship and moral decision making.