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,

Patricia Werhane is the Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics and Director, Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University as well as Professor Emerita at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia where she was the Peter and Adeline Ruffin Chair of Business Ethics and Senior Fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics until 2009. Until 1993 she was the Henry J. Wirtenberger Professor of Business Ethics at Loyola University of Chicago. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College, and M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University.

Professor Werhane is a founding member and past president of the Society of Business Ethics, past president of the American Society for Value Inquiry, and currently president of the International Society for Business, Economics and Ethics. She is also a member of the Academy of Management, the European Business Ethics Network, the American Philosophical Association, the International Society for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, and the Society for Philosophy and Public Affairs. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow at Dartmouth, Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge, and Erskine Visiting Fellow at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

Professor Werhane is the author or editor of over twenty books including Ethical Issues in Business, edited with Tom Donaldson eighth edition, Persons, Rights, and Corporations, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Managerial Decision-Making, and Organization Ethics for Health Care published by Oxford University Press. Her recent book, written with three co-authors, Women in Business, is aimed at the practicing executive. She has written over 100 published articles, case studies, and book chapters on various business ethics on such topics as employee and employer rights, mergers and acquisitions, responsibilities of multinational corporations, intellectual property, and the intersection between healthcare organizations and business ethics. Professor Werhane serves on the editorial boards of a number of journals and she is founder and former editor-in-chief of Business Ethics Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Business Ethics. She is also on the academic advisory committee in the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics. In 2008 she was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in business ethics by Ethisphere Magazine.

Her latest work, Profitable Partnerships for Poverty Alleviation with Laura Hartman, Dennis Moberg and Scott Kelley, focuses on globalization, with an emphasis on developing new models for corporate governance and corporate initiatives to alleviate poverty both in the United States and in less developed countries around the world. Her next project, with Hartman, Crina Archer, Elaine Englehardt and Michael Pritchard to be published by Cambridge University Press, is titled Obstacles to Decision-Making.