Overview of Ed Freeman's articles on Google Scholar

Values are central to the idea of “responsible leadership” and most modern discussions of business ethics are connected in a variety of ways to the concept of “values.” While there are several feasible ways to interpret the idea of “values,” most accounts assume that it makes sense to talk about both individual and corporate values. 1 Indeed, in recent times, business ethicists have proposed that we stop separating “business” from “ethics” and instead integrate values into our basic understanding of how we create value and trade with each other.

Although stakeholder theory and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have evolved into major theoretical frameworks for exploring social issues in management, there is a limited and often misleading understanding of the relationship between them that inhibits the management field from adopting a social orientation to a full extent. Our aim is to remove unnecessary barriers that preclude collaboration between scholars in the stakeholder theory and CSR camps; empower organizational scholars and practitioners with a more nuanced language for dealing with social issues in management; and enable the creation of a coherent and integrative theoretical foundation in the area of social issues in management that has previously been at a disadvantage to other areas in management. In our conceptual analysis, we argue that stakeholder theory and CSR provide distinct but complementary theoretical frameworks with some overlap. The actual decision to choose a particular framework depends on the problem one wants to solve and the settings of that problem.

The Business Roundtable, a large group of top CEOs, recently issued a statement defining the purpose of the corporation in stakeholder terms, a direct and intended reversal from an earlier statement that defined the duty of directors as serving the interests of stockholders. In this editorial, we briefly describe the major twists and turns in the stockholders-versus-stakeholders debate that make this statement so significant to management theory and practice. We then describe the implications of the statement for scholars and practicing managers. We end with a description of three specific research topics that require more research in light of this statement: firm boundaries, the nature of value creation systems, and theory regarding the destruction of stakeholder value.

There has been a growing understanding among organizational scholars and business practitioners that management in organizations has to be responsible to its stakeholders and to the society. Recent scholarship on responsible management focused on defining what ‘responsible’ in a management context means, and even though there has been noticeable progress in an understanding of the concept, the topic still remains open for further thinking. It is our strong belief that the comprehension of responsible management cannot be complete without brining into discussion key ideas of American Pragmatism. Thus, this work contributes to the ongoing discussion on responsible management by elaborating on far-reaching ideas of John Dewey, a renowned educator and social reformer whose philosophical ideas changed the landscape of many domains of our society. In this work, we show the relevance of Dewey’s thought-provoking ideas on individual’s responsibility to comprehending management responsibility in organizations.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine an approach to both business and business ethics that has come to be called “stakeholder theory.” While there is disagreement among stakeholder theorists about the scope and precise meaning of both “stakeholder” and “theory,” we shall take “stakeholder theory” to denote the body of research which has emerged in the last 15 years by scholars in management, business and society, and business ethics, in which the idea of “stakeholders” plays a crucial role.

The central claim of this paper is that organization studies needs to be fundamentally reshaped. Such change is needed to provide room for ethics and to increase the relevance of research. We argue that the new pragmatism provides critical resources for this change. Pragmatism is a particularly helpful tool to use in that it highlights the moral dimensions of organizing (is this useful for our purposes?) while at the same time avoiding entrenched epistemological distinctions that marginalize ethics and make research less useful.

Edward (Ed) Freeman, often called the father of stakeholder theory, is arguably one of the most influential and prolific thinkers in business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Here, he translates key ideas from his work to the context of responsible management. Ed discusses how responsible management might help to overcome the 'management sucks' narrative by reinventing management.

Stakeholder theory begins with the assumption that values are necessarily and explicitly a part of doing business. It asks managers to articulate the shared sense of the value they create, and what brings its core stakeholders together. It also pushes managers to be clear about how they want to do business, specifically what kinds of relationships they want and need to create with their stakeholders to deliver on their purpose.

In this chapter, we argue that the moral foundation of the descriptive pillar, pragmatism, provides a moral foundation for twenty-first century stakeholder theory. As we show, pragmatism and its close cousin pluralism fits a stakeholder theory concerned with the descriptive questions that characterize current work in stakeholder theory. Pragmatism and pluralism both see eudemonia, or human flourishing, as the outcome of moral choice. Stakeholder theory also advances an agenda of human flourishing, as positive relationships between businesses and their stakeholders contributes to individual and societal eudemonia.

This paper aims to integrate insights from psychoanalytic theory into business ethics research on the sources of ethical failures within organizations. We particularly draw from the analysis of sources and outcomes of neurotic processes that are part of human development, as described by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney and more recently by Manfred Kets de Vries; we interpret their insights from a stakeholder theory perspective.

This article seeks to defend and develop a stakeholder pragmatism advanced in some of the work by Edward Freeman and colleagues. By positioning stakeholder pragmatism more in line with the democratic and ethical base in American pragmatism (as developed by William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty), the article sets forth a fallibilistic stakeholder pragmatism that seeks to be more useful to companies by expanding the ways in which value is and can be created in a contingent world. A dialogue between a defence company and peace and arbitration society is used to illustrate the main plot of this article.)

The article focuses on questions concerning stakeholder theory and methods of unifying the theory. It states that two methodological versions of stakeholder theory, instrumental and normative, converge, with instrumental versions relying on hypothetical claims on the best route to achieve goals, while normative versions rely more on ethical claims. It mentions that connective logic linking the two needs to be rigorous as the two methodologies are divergent in nature. The article suggests there is logic that can link normative and empirical beliefs together. It states that the means of holding together normative and instrumental segments of stakeholder theory lies inside the minds of corporate executives.

Transaction cost economics (TCE), and more specifically the version of TCE that has been developed by Oliver Williamson, has become an increasingly important anchor for the analysis of a wide range of strategic and organizational issues of considerable importance to firms. As argued by some of its key proponents. the theory aims not only to explain but also to influence practice (Masten, 1993). In this article. we argue that prescriptions drawn from this theory are likely to be not only wrong but also dangerous for corporate managers because of the assumptions and logic on which it is grounded.

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“Two Dogmas” was to demonstrate that logical positivism was possible solely due to unjustified assumptions. Quine aimed to point out that the rescuing of empiricism was possible only if another, holistic approach was accepted. (Artur Koterski)

Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast/youtube)

As value chains become longer with increases in outsourcing and subcontracting, the challenges of fixing responsibility become more difficult. Using concepts from the literature on social networks, this paper considers issues of diffusion of responsibility and plausible deniability in such relationships. Specifically, this paper isolates three sources of denial of – or defense against – attributions of responsibility: connection, control and knowledge. (Robert A. Phillips)

Many parallels can be drawn between organizational and individual pathologies. We believe that the fantasies of top executives and the neurotic styles to which they give rise are important determinants of the nature of organizational dysfunctions. (Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, Danny Miller)

For the past 2000 years, the dominant morality in the West, according to Nietzsche, has been an “anti-natural” morality, which, in his words, turns “against the instincts of life”. Nietzsche foresaw this morality as reigning over the Western world for the foreseeable future, and was to him “the danger of dangers” – a morality in which all individuals, even those with the potential to rise above the mediocre mass, are pressured into becoming a "herd animal".  (video)

"I am therefore almost inclined to suggest that you require from your laureates an oath of humility, a sort of hippocratic oath, never to exceed in public pronouncements the limits of their competence. Or you ought at least, on conferring the prize, remind the recipient of the sage counsel of one of the great men in our subject, Alfred Marshall, who wrote: 'Students of social science, must fear popular approval: Evil is with them when all men speak well of them'".