At HEC Paris, Rodolphe (Rudy) Durand is the holder of the Joly Family Purposeful Leadership Chair and Academic Director of the S&O Purpose Center. Until September 2024, he was the Academic Director of the Society and Organizations (S&O) Institute which he founded in 2009. As a scholar, Rudy’s primary research interests concern the normative and cognitive dimensions of firms’ performance, and especially the consequences for firms of defining their purpose and coping with the current major environmental and social challenges. For his work, 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. He has been Associate Editor at SMJ for six years (2017-2023), and is currently serving in his first term on te SMS Board of Directors (2021-2024).
As an advisor, committee member (impact committee at a VC fund, purpose committee in two purpose-based firms), and non-executive board member, Rodolphe works with multiple firms on their competitive advantage, and developing and implementing social and environmental impact strategies.
Nurtured by his academic and practical experience, 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 Fringes of Capitalism (co-authored with JP Vergne, Harvard Press, 2013), Organizations, Strategy, and Society: The Orgology of Disorganized Worlds (Routledge, 2014), and “A Broader Vision of Business” coauthored with Veolia’s CEO, Antoine Frérot (Flammarion, 2022).