Author Statements
Author Profiles and Positionality Statements
Caroline Burns
Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
Saint Mary’s College of California
I come to this textbook having spent half my professional life in industry and half in academia. My early career was in hospitality management, where I witnessed, and at times participated in, business practices that were legal but ethically unsettling. Those formative years left me with a lasting awareness of how organizations justify their choices, and how individuals inside them often have far less power than official charts suggest. My view of business has always been shaped more by break rooms than by boardrooms. As a first-generation college graduate, raised in a working-class household and shaped by the experiences of immigration and economic precarity, I’ve spent much of my life aware of how vulnerable people can be to the decisions of those with more power and security. That grounding shapes how I approach questions of responsibility and power. Having moved through corporate and academic spaces with a perspective that doesn’t always match the dominant mold, I’ve learned to pay close attention to what gets overlooked, unheard, or dismissed. Those sensitivities inform my contributions to this textbook. Finally, my contribution is grounded in a respect for business as a potential force for good, and a belief that its ethical legitimacy depends on how it treats the humans and the natural world that sustain it and those who profit most from its operations.
Grant Rozeboom
Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Social Responsibility
Saint Mary’s College of California
My academic training is in philosophy, with a focus on ethics, and much of my work is in what’s called “normative business ethics,” which examines the basic principles and values that should inform the structure of markets and their participants. I’m the first academic in my family, and so my approach to this book was guided by a concern to present theoretical frameworks in a clear, accessible way that provides a bridge for readers encountering this material for the first time. Given my academic background, I focused most heavily on the sections introducing philosophical frameworks and conceptual foundations.
Sarah M. Vital
Business Librarian
Saint Mary’s College of California
I come to this project not as a subject-matter expert in business, but as an academic librarian with further scholarly and teaching experience in communication and rhetoric. My role in this work was to support cohesion in the contributions of the two primary authors, both of them being subject experts with different perspectives. As a non-traditional academic scholar– from my experience as a first-generation college student to my role in academia outside of a professorial role– and as someone slightly outside the discipline, my ultimate goal was to focus on the undergraduate student reader. I aimed to ensure the accessibility of the language, the clarity of examples, and the overall supportiveness of the included learning aids.
