December 16, 2011
Friends,
I am writing to share the sad news that Lee E. Preston passed away on
November 22, 2011. Lee was a scholar, mentor, and friend.
Lee was one of the founders of the SIM Division in the 1970s and played
a leadership role in SIM and the business and society field for many
years. Lee is survived by his wife, Patricia (Pat), three children
and ten grandchildren. He also leaves a large number of
friends, colleagues, and collaborators at home and abroad.
Lee grew up in Denton, Texas. He earned a scholarship to Vanderbilt
University where he majored in economics. After graduation he was
admitted to the PhD program in economics at Harvard where he studied
under Edward S. Mason, E. H. Chamberlain, and thesis advisor
Carl Kaysen. He served in the US army for two years in Germany, an
experience which started a lifelong interest in international travel.
Upon completion of his PhD he became an assistant professor at the
business school of UC Berkeley.
An expert in industrial organization and antitrust policy, Lee served
in the Kennedy Administration as a staff economist in the Office of the
President?s Council for Economic Advisors. Upon returning to Berkeley,
he was promoted to associate professor, full
professor, and served as associate dean of the business school.
During the turbulence of the 1960s, Lee developed an interest in how
managers were responding to the non-market social and political
pressures that business was facing. This topic became the centerpiece
of his research for decades.
In 1970, Lee accepted a chaired position as Melvin H. Baker Professor
of American Enterprise at the SUNY Buffalo. He published extensively
and his writings were instrumental in creating the field of corporate
social responsibility. His classic book "Private Management and
Public Policy," (1975), is soon to be republished by Stanford
University Press.
Lee moved to the University of Maryland in 1980 and served there until
his retirement in 1998. Lee?s many service contributions at Maryland
included creating and directing the Center for Business and
International Relations (CIBER). He helped create a joint MBA
program with the University of Lodz in Poland and was recognized by the
government of Poland for this work including a degree of Doctor Honoris
Causa. Also while at Maryland in 1985 he spent a semester advising the
Ministry of Commerce of the government of China
on corporate governance issues.
During his distinguished career he was the author or coauthor of
approximately 200 publications. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy
of Management in 1982, named a Distinguished Scholar Teacher at
Maryland in 1994, and received the University?s
Distinguished International Service Award in 1996. Upon "retirement,"
he served for three years as Ombudsman for faculty and staff on the
Maryland campus. After "retiring" from this position he became a
volunteer researcher for the US National Archives, taught in
the Lifelong Learning Institute, and continued his lifelong volunteer
activities for many social and community efforts.
Lee?s many contributions to the business and society field include his
role as the founding editor of ?Research in Corporate Social
Performance and Policy? (10 volumes) from 1978-88. This research
series helped to establish the empirical foundation of the
field, and Lee?s editing and candid feedback helped many of us improve
our work.
Lee also published important papers on CSR topics in such leading
journals as the Journal of Economic Literature, CMR, AMR, Journal of
Behavioral Economics, and others. Many of his papers were ?first?
papers to be published in those journals, thereby setting a
precedent and opening a pathway for other scholars to follow.
An empiricist at heart, Lee famously argued that ?Corporations ARE what
they DO,? and helped to shape the subfield of corporate social
performance reporting. In the mid-1990s, Lee contributed to the
stakeholder management literature, writing a much-cited
paper with Tom Donaldson (?The Stakeholder Theory of the Corporation:
Concepts, Evidence, and Implications,? Academy of Management Review,
Vol. 20, No 1 1995 pp. 65-91).
Always a builder, Lee joined with Tom Donaldson and Max Clarkson in the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-sponsored project to establish an
international network of scholars and practitioners in order to ?launch
a program of research and discussion that might lead to
new thinking and new knowledge in this area.? [See Max B. E. Clarkson,
ed., ?The Corporation and Its Stakeholders: Classic and Contemporary
Readings," University of Toronto Press, 1998]. These findings were
reported in a series of reports and the book,
?Redefining the Corporation? (J. Post, L. Preston, S. Sachs, Stanford
University Press, 2002). The Sloan project helped to fund many papers
on stakeholder management by young scholars in the late 1990s.
Lee saw the future of the field in the international and global
governance domains. His work in both areas provided an important
capstone and elaboration of the ?principle of public responsibility?
articulated in ?Private Management and Public Policy? nearly forty
years ago.
Jim Post
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