Groundwork for an Anthropology of Entrepreneurial Ethics in South-East Asia

The entrepreneurship ethics is widely mobilized in business and enterprise milieu in South-East Asia where it is most often presented as a set of moral, ideological or religious precepts that local actors designate by the term << Asianvalues >>. The purpose of this introduction is to put these so called values in the context of entrepreneurship on the basis of seminal works dealing with South-East Asian entreprises. We will see that in most cases these works oscillate between two poles: first, Max Weber's sociology of industrial capitalism through the prism of religious ethics, and secondly the substantivist approach of Karl Polanyi. If the analytical tools of these debates have been applied mostly to entrepreneurs from the Chinese Diaspora, it is the question of the entrepreneurs' dominant ideology through the prism of philosophical and religious currents which serve as benchmarks. How values and ideologies are perpetuated, adapted or implemented by company management? How do they fit also in micro-strategies of local actors? How does entrepreneurial ethics decline in business of various statutes and in entrepreneurs' families? What images these families do build, and what are the values involved in the construction of this ethics? In other words, we mean to observe existing practices in this part of the world and understand their logic through anthropological analysis. Thus, contributions of this issue provide both some answers and open to other ideas to contribute to outline what "entrepreneurship ethics" can be in the region of South-East Asia expanded to Sino-Indian margins.