Frédéric Godart

Frédéric Godart is an Associate Professor (with tenure) of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. He received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in New York. He also holds an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) in the United Kingdom, an MSc in Management from Sciences Po Paris, and was a student (“normalien”) at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay. In 2011, he received the French national accreditation to supervise PhD-level research (“Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” or HDR) from Paris-Dauphine University. He has held various academic positions at HEC Paris (where he was the Academic Director of the HEC Luxury Certificate sponsored by Kering), the Università della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano (Switzerland), Sciences Po Paris, the Università di Bologna (in Italy), and the University of Southern California (USC) – Marshall School of Business.

Before completing his PhD, Frédéric worked with McKinsey & Company in Belgium for three years. There, he developed his practical business knowledge in several functional areas, in particular competitive intelligence and social network analysis. He was also involved in multiple strategic studies for a wide range of clients across industrial sectors.

His research focuses on the dynamics of creative industries, and he mostly covers fashion and luxury (e.g., design, modeling, watchmaking, footwear). He explores the impact of formal and informal social networks on creativity, as well as the role played by stylistic choices and brand dynamics in the formation of firms and customers’ identities. He has received several prestigious awards such as the Academy of Management Organisational Behaviour Division’s 2012 Best Paper Award and the Academy of Management Conflict Management Division’s 2017 Best Paper Award – New Directions.

Frédéric teaches Organisational Behaviour II: Leading Organisations (OB2), and Value Creation in Luxury & Fashion (VCL&F) in the INSEAD MBA programme. Prior to this, he taught Power & Politics (P&P) in the same programme, and Organisational Sociology and Advanced Topics in OB/OT in the INSEAD PhD programme. At HEC Paris he taught Leading Organisations in the school's Master in Management (MiM), and Leadership and Strategic Talent Management in the HEC Paris International EMBA.

Frédéric has published his research in a wide range of leading academic peer-reviewed journals such as Organisation Science, the Academy of Management Journal, the Strategic Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Forces, and in several edited books. He wrote a book on the structure and culture of the fashion industry, Sociologie de la mode (A Sociology of Fashion), which has been translated into Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (Argentina). An extended English translation (at Palgrave-MacMillan) is available with the title Unveiling Fashion. He also wrote a book on the intellectual history of fashion, Penser la Mode (Thinking about Fashion). His work and expertise has been extensively featured in several international media outlets such as The New York Times, El Pais, The Financial Times, Women’s Wear Daily, and in French national media such as Le Monde, Les Echos, and Le Figaro.

Read case studies by Frédéric here.