Frédéric Godart

Frédéric Godart is an Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD. Prior to joining INSEAD as a full-time tenure-track faculty, he spent two years there as a post-doctoral research and teaching fellow.

 

Frédéric received his PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in the City of 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 is a former fellow of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan in France. He has recently been accredited to supervise research in management at Dauphine University in Paris. He has received several prestigious awards such as the Academy of Management OB Division’s 2012 Best Paper Award.

 

His research focuses on the dynamics of creative industries. More specifically, 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. In terms of sectors, he covers fashion and luxury (e.g., design, modeling, watchmaking, footwear).

 

Frédéric teaches Power & Politics (P&P) and Organisational Behaviour II: Leading Organisations (OB2) in the INSEAD MBA program. The aim of P&P is to help students develop a conceptual framework to understand power, and gain defensive and offensive political skills. The goal of OB2 is to help students understand and leverage the dynamics that occur in all large groups He teaches Organizational Sociology and Advanced Topics in OB/OT in the PhD program.

 

He has published his research in a wide range of leading academic peer reviewed journals such as Organization Science, Organization Studies, the Annual Review of Sociology, and Social Forces, and in several edited books. Frédéric 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 such as El Pais, The Financial Times or Women's Wear Daily, and in French national media such as Le Monde, Les Echos, or Le Figaro.

 

Prior to completing his PhD, Frédéric worked for three year with McKinsey & Company in Belgium. 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.

 

Read case studies by Frédéric here.