The brass ring and the golden rule: Interpretive narratives of profitable and values-led enterprises in praxis with community (Ed.D. Dissertation)

This critical hermeneutic research tells the stories of enterprises seeking balance between their profits and care for their communities. This work demonstrates business' commitment to creative social action that mitigates community needs or enhances community life. The central premise explores enterprises working for social betterment while maintaining a profit-orientation. Research follows a critical hermeneutic philosophy as applied to an interpretive anthropological protocol for inquiry and analysis. Hermeneutic philosophy takes an ontological perspective focused on human experience as interpreted meaning. Interpretation is based in language and is guided by culture and life experience but meaning is derived from critical reflection. An interpretive, participatory, anthropological protocol allowed this researcher to assume a first-person approach to analysis. Through the use of narrative readers are invited into the researcher's interactive world with research participants. Narrat