Designing the tools of the trade: How corporate social responsibility consultants and their tool-based practices created market shifts

Combining insights from the sociology of markets and studies of consultants, this article examines the tool-based practices by which market actors enable the agencing of the supply and demand of the market in ways that shape market’s trajectory. Building on 30 interviews and a rich set of secondary data, we provide an analysis of the development of a market for consultancy products and services for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the province of Quebec (Canada). We analytically induced six tool-based practices by which consultants contributed to the agencing of the market, and our results show how these practices collectively created market shifts. Our analysis offers new insights into the processes by which consultants’ tool-based practices produce market shifts, embed environmental and social concerns within market mechanisms, and ‘vascularize’ markets

Consultants as discreet corporate change agents for sustainability: Transforming organizations from the outside-in

Despite their central role in the construction and development of the market for virtues as well as in the design, implementation, and evaluation of corporate sustainability strategies and governmental sustainability policies, sustainability consultants remain at best “hidden” corporate change agents. In this paper, we bring sustainability consultants back to the fore to account for how these actors discreetly regulate and shape contemporary sustainability transformations from the outside-in. We do so first by unpacking various roles of consultants as engineers, market builders, power vehicles, boundary workers, issue translators, and soft regulators; then we conceptualize how, through these roles, they contribute to empowering, legitimizing but also potentially supplanting and undermining the activities of corporate change agents operating inside corporations. We finally propose some research orientations for studying further the role of sustainability consultants in corporate transformations towards sustainability

Large second harmonic generation enhancement in SiN waveguides by all-optically induced quasi phase matching

Integrated waveguides exhibiting efficient second-order nonlinearities are crucial to obtain compact and low power optical signal processing devices. Silicon nitride (SiN) has shown second harmonic generation (SHG) capabilities in resonant structures and single-pass devices leveraging intermodal phase matching, which is defined by waveguide design. Lithium niobate allows compensating for the phase mismatch using periodically poled waveguides, however the latter are not reconfigurable and remain difficult to integrate with SiN or silicon (Si) circuits. Here we show the all-optical enhancement of SHG in SiN waveguides by more than 30 dB. We demonstrate that a Watt-level laser causes a periodic modification of the waveguide second-order susceptibility. The resulting second order nonlinear grating has a periodicity allowing for quasi phase matching (QPM) between the pump and SH mode. Moreover, changing the pump wavelength or polarization updates the period, relaxing phase matching constraints imposed by the waveguide geometry. We show that the grating is long term inscribed in the waveguides, and we estimate a second order nonlinearity of the order of 0.3 pm/V, while a maximum conversion efficiency (CE) of 1.8x10-6 W-1 cm-2 is reached

Resolvent-based jet noise models: a projection approach

Linear resolvent analysis has demonstrated encouraging results for modeling coherent structures in jets when compared against their data-deduced counterparts from high-fidelity large-eddy simulations (LES). However, leveraging resolvent modes for reconstructing statistics of the far acoustic field remains elusive. In this study, we use a LES database to produce an ensemble of realizations for the acoustic field that we project on to a limited set of n resolvent modes. The projections are done on a restricted acoustic output domain, r/D= [5,6], and allow for the LES realizations to be recast in the resolvent basis via a data-deduced, low-rank, n x n cross-spectral density matrix. We find substantial improvements to the acoustic field reconstructions with the addition of a RANS-derived eddy-viscosity model to the resolvent operator. The reconstructions quantitatively match the most energetic regions of the acoustic field across Strouhal numbers, St= [0−1], and azimuthal wavenumbers, m= [0,2], using only three resolvent modes. Finally, the characteristics of the resulting n x n covariance matrices are examined and suggest off-diagonal terms may be neglected for n ≤ 3. Results are presented for round, isothermal, Mach 1.5 and 0.9 jets

Modeling intermittent wavepackets and their radiated sound in a turbulent jet

We use data from a new, carefully validated, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) to investigate and model subsonic, turbulent, jet noise. Motivated by the observation that sound-source dynamics are dominated by instability waves (wavepackets), we examine mechanisms by which their intermittency can amplify their noise radiation. Two scenarios, both involving wavepacket evolution on time-dependent base flows, are investigated. In the first, we consider that the main effect of the changing base flow consists in different wavepacket ensembles seeing different steady mean fields, and having, accordingly, different acoustic efficiencies. In the second, the details of the base-flow time dependence also play a role in wavepacket sound production. Both short-time-averaged and slowly varying base flows are extracted from the LES data and used in conjunction with linearized wavepacket models, namely, the Parabolized Stability Equations (PSE), the One-Way Euler Equations (OWE), and the Linearized Euler Equations (LEE). All results support the hypothesized mechanism: wavepackets on time-varying base flows produce sound radiation that is enhanced by as much as 20dB in comparison to their long-time-averaged counterparts, and ensembles of wavepackets based on short-time-averaged base flows display similar amplification. This is not, however, sufficient to explain the sound levels observed in the LES and experiments. Further work is therefore necessary to incorporate two additional factors in the linear models, body forcing by turbulence and realistic inflow forcing, both of which have been identified as potentially important in producing the observed radiation efficiency