UVA Darden School Professor R. Edward Freeman Receives Lifetime Achievement Award From Humbolt University in Berlin

University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor R. Edward Freeman received the 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award Wednesday at the Sixth International Conference on Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility (CSR) hosted at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.

Recognized for his contributions in creating a “platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue” over a span of more than 30 years, Freeman was presented with the award by CSR conference director Joachim Schwalbach during a special ceremony in which he received a standing ovation from over 200 convention attendees from around the world. Freeman is perhaps best known for his award-winning book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, originally published in 1984 and reprinted in 2010 by Cambridge University Press. In this seminal work, he suggests that businesses build their strategy around their relationships with key stakeholders.

Freeman is the author or editor of more than 25 volumes in the areas of stakeholder management, business strategy and business ethics, as well as nearly 150 articles in a wide variety of publications. At its 2010 annual meeting, the Society for Business Ethicsawarded its Outstanding Contributions to Scholarship Award to Freeman, noting that there were more than 35,000 citations to his work.

Robert Phillips (Ph.D. ’97), Darden alumnus and associate professor at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business, lauded Freeman in a presentation preceding the award ceremony. “With nothing more or less magical than good ideas, generosity and force of will, he [Freeman] continues to lead generations of scholars and practitioners toward finding our own paths to making the world a little better than we found it,” said Phillips.

Freeman joined the Darden School in 1987. Currently, he is University Professor and Elis and Signe Olsson Professor of Business Administration, senior fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, and an academic director of Darden’s Institute for Business in Society. Freeman is also a professor of religious studies and a faculty adviser to UVA’s Institute for Practical Ethics. In March 2010, the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia named Freeman a University Professor. Freeman is the first faculty member in Darden’s history to receive this rare honor.

In 2008, Professor Freeman received an honorary doctorate (Doctor Honoris Causa) from Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain for his work on stakeholder theory and business ethics, and again in 2013 from Radbord University in the Netherlands. He was also elected Fellow of the Academy of Management in 2013. Freeman has received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Darden student body in 1993 and State Council for Higher Education in 2005; in 2001, he was honored by the World Resources Institute and the Aspen Institute with a Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement; and in 2005, he received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Virginia State Council on Higher Education.