Bridging Management and Social Innovation: A Journey of Qualitative Research and Community Impact – Meet new Faculty Member Mathieu Bouchard

Mathieu Bouchard was hired over the summer as an assistant professor in management at the Telfer School of Management. He completed an MBA and a PhD at HEC Montréal. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a strategic adviser for large pension plans. We interviewed him to learn more about his research interests. 

Why did you choose to study management? Any personal motivation?

My background is in economics and finance. I worked for eight years in pension investment and am a CFA charter holder. I wanted to move on and do qualitative research about social issues while also building on my background. To accomplish this goal, I decided to complete a PhD in management at HEC Montréal. 

How does your PhD training inform your current research? 

I wanted to study community-based alternatives to biomedical treatments in mental health care, a topic deeply personal to me. As an investment practitioner who had just completed an MBA, I knew next to nothing about qualitative research. The PhD program gave me the tools I needed to do the research I wanted to do. I surrounded myself with a wonderful group of scholars who believed in my work and showed me the tricks of the trade. 

Do you have any new research highlights to share? Any interesting publications in the pipeline? 

Recently, I published the framework of my doctoral dissertation in the Academy of Management Review. It theorizes how emotions lead clients to participate in social movements that contest the work that professionals do. I have several exciting papers in the pipeline exploring how service users organize alternatives when professional systems do not satisfy their needs and aspirations. Overall, I explore how user-led organizations operate as a formidable ecology of social innovation in the periphery of professional systems, and why that matters for professionals and the organizations in which they work. 

How can your research influence business communities in Canada? 

So far, I have mostly focused my research on the health-care system (mutual aid groups, peer support workers, patient partners). I frequently present my work to health-care policymakers, managers and professionals — and it resonates with them. It gives them concepts to interpret and think about what to do with challenges that they experience in their everyday work. Now, I am starting to explore user-led organizations in elementary education (learning centres by and for homeschoolers) and in banking (peer-to-peer lending networks).