Abstract:

Entrepreneurial initiative and spirit are values, behaviors and skills to promote for contributing to socio-economic development and to the welfare of individuals (CEC, 2003), so they cannot be understood without taking into account ethical and legal influences. The need of promoting entrepreneurship from an ethical and responsible perspective leads to focus on education as a key instrument for generating the changes in the knowledge, values and behaviors necessary to achieve sustainability and stability within and among countries, democracy, security and peace (UNESCO, 2002). From an autopoietic perspective (Luhmann, 1997), societies and their education systems change to meet these needs that are relevant to sustainable development (Orr, 2010). According to this approach, the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA) proposes a series of generic skills that everyone should acquire or improve through their higher education learning experience. The Tuning Project (2007) classifies these generic skills into three groups: instrumental, interpersonal and systemic ones. These skills include those related to business creation and management, and ethics, and expressly states that entrepreneurial initiative and spirit (systemic competence) and ethical commitment (interpersonal competence) are skills needed in the new socio-economic context (Barreda-Tarrazona and Márquez-Garcia, 2010; Márquez-García and Barreda-Tarrazona, 2010). Therefore, higher education institutions should promote entrepreneurial initiative and spirit and ethical commitment as both personally and socially desirable behaviors (Hayton and Kelley, 2006). Since students will be the decision-makers of the future, their education must be built on solid ethical bases (Mele, 2008; Lau, 2010; Barreda-Tarrazona and Márquez-Garcia, 2010) to enable sustainable growth and contribute to social and economic welfare, by promoting sustainable, social, legal and ethically responsible entrepreneurship.

The aim of this study is to determine to what extent these auto-normative (ethics) and hetero-normative (law) aspects influence the entrepreneurial intention on students, through their antecedents in Ajzen’s (1985, 1991, 2011) theory of planned behavior (attitude, subjective norms and perceived control related to entrepreneurial behavior). Taking into account that legal training of law students may be more oriented to the promotion of ethical and justice-related values, we compare them with students of business administration, whose training is more geared to meeting stakeholders’ needs and obtaining an economic benefit.

Keywords:

Ethics, law, entrepreneurial intention, Ajzen.