“An exploration of the ethical principles and practices for financing the UAE - United Arab Emirates’ social enterprises in the emirate of Abu Dhabi”

Abstract

Organisations constantly compete for limited resources, especially financial, to balance their socioeconomic goals. In that connection, there is increasing emphasis on ensuring ethical principles and practices in the operational dynamics of enterprises, especially social enterprises (SEs). Inspired by research pertinence, this study explored the ethical principles and practices in financing social enterprises for better understanding and direction. This study was implemented in the Abu Dhabi emirates of UAE. This study is premised within the interpretivism paradigm. Given that, this study followed the inductive foundation and used a qualitative approach that involved interviews with 15 personnel in organisations which were selected based on their suitability as core knowledge repositories towards understanding the theoretical elements that constitute the scope of this research. A rigorous data analysis process was followed to capture the meanings in the qualitative data. Specifically, data analysis in this study followed the thematic analysis foundation to understand the levels of coding in the data leading to thematic conclusions. Thematically organised, the findings shed light on the role of ethics in social enterprise funding in the UAE, the nature of ethical principles and practices that are endorsed in the social enterprises sector in the UAE, as well as the effectiveness of ethics in social enterprise financing in the UAE. Also highlighted are the nature of challenges faced by social enterprises in the context, as well as the factors that are considered critical in the regard. Addressing core research gaps, this research contributes in a number of ways both to theory and practice. The theoretical implications of this study have been pinpointed showing the areas of similarity as well as contrasts to existing literature. Furthermore, the practitioner implications of this study have been explained, flagging critical recommendations that implications have been flagged specifying policy initiatives that could be leveraged from this study towards driving effective social enterprise ethically guided behaviour. To conclude, the limitations of this study have been acknowledged and future research directions flagged. would enable optimal and effective social enterprise operations while fully endorsing required ethical guidelines. Further in the practitioner implication regards, policy

Date of Award	2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aberystwyth University
Supervisor	Julie Jones (Supervisor) & Ahmed Mohammed (Supervisor)