R. Edward Freeman

Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration
Darden School of Business
Biography Paragraphs
Ed Freeman

R. Edward Freeman is University Professor and Olsson Professor of Business Administration, and an academic director of the Institute for Business in Society at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is also adjunct professor of stakeholder management at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, visiting professor at Nyenrode Business School (Netherlands), adjunct professor of management at Monash University (Melbourne). 

Freeman is the co-author of Bridging the Values Gap (Berrett-Koehler, 2015) Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art (Cambridge, 2010) and Managing for Stakeholders (Yale, 2007). He is the author or editor of over 30 volumes and 150 articles in the areas of stakeholder management, business strategy and business ethics. Freeman is perhaps best known for his award winning book: Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Cambridge, 2010), originally published in 1984, in which he traced the origins of the stakeholder idea to a number of others and suggested that businesses build their strategy around their relationships with key stakeholders. He was the editor of the Ruffin Series in Business Ethics (15 volumes) published by Oxford. He is the co-editor with Mette Morsing and Jeremy Moon of the Cambridge Series Business, Society and Value Creation (11 volumes).

Freeman has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Washington University. He was recently awarded honorary doctorates (DHC) in economics from Comillas University in Madrid, the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, and an honorary doctorates in management from Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands and Sherbrooke University in Canada for his work on stakeholder theory and business ethics

With Darden faculty colleagues, Professor Freeman developed and serves as instructor of the new PhD Plus Business in Society skills series. 

Core Module