Rodolphe Durand

Rodolphe Durand

Visiting Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership

  • durand@hec.fr

Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street
Oxford
OX1 1HP

Profile

Rodolphe (Rudy) Durand is the Joly Family Professor of Purposeful Leadership at HEC Paris and the founder and academic director of the Society and Organizations Institute (S&O) which he launched in 2009.

Over the past decade, he has been Visiting Professor at UCLA (Anderson), Oxford University (Saïd Business School), New York University (Stern Business School), London Business School, and Cambridge University (Judge Business School), and Visiting Scholar at Harvard Business School. As a board member, purpose committee member, and advisor, Rodolphe works with multiple organizations on developing, implementing, and assessing impact strategies that value a firm’s purpose and intangible asset.

Research

As a scholar, Rodolphe’s primary research interests concern the normative and cognitive dimensions of firms' performance, and especially the consequences for firms of identifying and coping with the current major environmental and social challenges.

Why do organizations supersede rivals? Can Corporate Social Responsibility bring an advantage to firms and diffuse in markets?  How and why does a firm’s purpose provide economic advantages?

For his work on these questions that integrate multiple research streams, Rodolphe received the American Sociological Association’s R Scott Award in 2005, the European Academy of Management/Imagination Lab Award for Innovative Scholarship in 2010, was inducted Fellow of the Strategic Management Society in 2014, and granted a Doctor Honoris Causa from UC Louvain in 2019.

Publications

Beyond his publications in academic journals, Rodolphe is also a prolific author of books where he puts in perspective the decline of ideologies, the evolution of capitalism, and the new foundations of management, notably:

  • Organizational Evolution and Strategic Management (Sage, 2006)
  • The Pirate Organization: Lessons from the Fringed of Capitalism (co-authored with JP Vergne, Harvard Press, 2013)
  • Organizations, Strategy, and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds (Routledge, 2014)
  • A Broader Vision of Business coauthored with Veolia’s CEO, Antoine Frérot (Flammarion, 2022)