Professor of Ethics Elected to Fellowship of Distinguished Business Scholars

PROVO, Utah – Aug 14, 2020 – Brad Agle, the George W. Romney Endowed Professor and Professor of Ethics and Leadership at the BYU Marriott School of Business, has been elected as a Fellow of the International Association for Business and Society (IABS). His election to this distinguished group comes as a result of years of dedication and contribution both inside the classroom and in the world of business scholars.

This election is personally momentous to Agle. “I was humbled to receive such an incredible honor,” he says. “The IABS Fellows are a group of senior scholars I've known and looked up to my entire career. Having my professional colleagues acknowledge my career accomplishments and service in this way was deeply meaningful. Becoming a member of the Fellows is particularly significant to me because my career has largely paralleled the development of the IABS professional association. I gave my first academic presentation at the first annual conference of IABS as a second-year doctoral student in 1990.”

Agle feels he is a good match for the organization because much of his own personal research has addressed questions IABS strives to answer. “IABS is a professional association of academics who do research involving the intersection of business with other institutions of society,” he says. “The biggest questions currently being asked in the business world revolve around the research performed by professors in our field. I have published various articles and books providing answers to these questions and plan to continue to do so.” 

Scholarship and research are indeed a vital part of IASB. According to the Constitution of the Fellows of the International Association for Business and Society, the fellows of IABS are selected “to recognize outstanding contributions to the scholarship and practice of Business and Society; to exercise a leadership role in education and scholarship in the field.”  

Agle’s career prepared him to qualify for this honor and will enable him to help IABS reach its goals in the future. During his seventeen years at the University of Pittsburgh and eleven years at BYU, he has served in various leadership positions, including as president of IABS and on the editorial board of Business Ethics Quarterly. 

In addition to his teaching and leadership experience, Agle has conducted research on a variety of topics such as stakeholder management, religious influences on business, CEO leadership, and business ethics. Many of his articles are influential and heavily cited.

Both his 1997 and 2016 articles on stakeholder management received the annual IABS best article in the field award.  His 1997 article, “Toward a theory of stakeholder identification and salience: Defining the principle of who and what really counts,” is currently the most cited article in the field of corporate social responsibility. His 2016 book, The Business Ethics Field Guide, was runner-up for the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management’s Best Scholarly Book award.

In addition to his contributions to the world of business, Agle also makes a difference at BYU Marriott. “We are grateful for the work he has done at the Romney Institute of Public Service and Ethics and BYU Marriott to broadly to increase our knowledge and expertise in ethics and help our students be better prepared to make ethical decisions in their workplaces, their communities, and their homes,” says Lori Wadsworth, director of the BYU Marriott MPA program.