R. Edward Freeman

R. Edward Freeman (1951-) was born in Columbus Georgia and educated in mathematics and philosophy at Duke University and Washington University. Currently he is University Professor and Olsson Professor of Business Administration; Academic Director of the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics at the Darden School, University of Virginia. He is also Adjunct Professor of Stakeholder Management at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and a Visiting Professor at Nyenrode Business School (Netherlands). He currently holds an honorary appointment as the Welling Professor at George Washington University and the Gourlay Professorship at University of Melbourne.

For 30 years Freeman has written about stakeholder theory and business. His latest book, Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Managing for Stakeholders was published in 2007 by Yale University Press. His co-authors are Jeffrey Harrison, Andrew Wicks, Bidhan Parmar, and Simone de Colle. Freeman is perhaps best known for his award winning book: Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, published in 1984, and reissued in 2010 by Cambridge University Press, where he traced the origins of the stakeholder idea and suggested that businesses build their strategy around their relationships with key stakeholders.

In 2008 Freeman was awarded an honorary doctorate in economics by Comillas University in Madrid for his work on stakeholder theory and business ethics. He is a lifelong student of philosophy, martial arts, and the blues,