88 research outputs found
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The Performativity of Literature Reviewing: Constituting the Corporate Social Responsibility Literature through Re-Presentation and Intervention
Although numerous books and articles provide toolkit approaches to explain how to conduct literature reviews, these prescriptions regard literature reviewing as the production of representations of academic fields. Such representationalism is rarely questioned. Building on insights from social studies of science, we conceptualize literature reviewing as a performative endeavor that co-constitutes the literature it is supposed to “neutrally” describe, through a dual movement of re-presenting—constructing an account different from the literature, and intervening—adding to and potentially shaping this literature. We discuss four problems inherent to this movement of performativity—description, explicitness, provocation, and simulacrum—and then explore them through a systematic review of 48 reviews of the literature on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) for the period 1975-2019. We provide evidence for the performative role of literature reviewing in the CSR field through both re-presenting and intervening. We find that reviews performed the CSR literature and, accordingly, the field’s boundaries, categories, priorities in a self-sustaining manner. By reflexively subjecting our own systematic review to the four performative problems we discuss, we also derive implications of performative analysis for the practice of literature reviewing
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United we stand, divided we fall: Building successful relationships in Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability
The research report, based on 44 interviews with professionals, focuses on in-house CR and Sustainability professionals and consultants. The aim of this study is to help these actors to have greater impact through their relationships and improve the personal, societal, and corporate value of these interactions. There is little systematic evidence about what makes a relationship between consultants and their clients successful, particularly in the field of CR and Sustainability.
The research:
• Specifies distinctiveness of the field.
• Defines success in a CR and Sustainability relationship.
• Identifies key factors that enable and threaten this success.
• Paints a picture of an ideal consultant and an ideal client.
• Uncovers a number of tensions in the field.
• Proposes greater transparency in client-consultant interactions and suggests useful techniques.
• Detects a number of trends in these professional relationships.
Findings show that the UK CR and Sustainability profession connects strongly with a common goal and has a sense of distinctiveness compared to other areas of consulting services, such as strategy or finance. This leads to specific dilemmas, to which generic solutions might not be applicable
A smooth entropy approach to quantum hypothesis testing and the classical capacity of quantum channels
We use the smooth entropy approach to treat the problems of binary quantum
hypothesis testing and the transmission of classical information through a
quantum channel. We provide lower and upper bounds on the optimal type II error
of quantum hypothesis testing in terms of the smooth max-relative entropy of
the two states representing the two hypotheses. Using then a relative entropy
version of the Quantum Asymptotic Equipartition Property (QAEP), we can recover
the strong converse rate of the i.i.d. hypothesis testing problem in the
asymptotics. On the other hand, combining Stein's lemma with our bounds, we
obtain a stronger (\ep-independent) version of the relative entropy-QAEP.
Similarly, we provide bounds on the one-shot \ep-error classical capacity of
a quantum channel in terms of a smooth max-relative entropy variant of its
Holevo capacity. Using these bounds and the \ep-independent version of the
relative entropy-QAEP, we can recover both the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland
theorem about the optimal direct rate of a memoryless quantum channel with
product state encoding, as well as its strong converse counterpart.Comment: v4: Title changed, improved bounds, both direct and strong converse
rates are covered, a new Discussion section added. 20 page
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Meta-Reviewing the Business and Society Field through Sociological Paradigms: Towards Pluralistic Re-Presentations of Corporate Social Responsibility
Although the growth of the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) calls for more diverse exercises of reviewing, most reviews of CSR research present the organising categories on which they build as taken-for-granted. In so doing, they reify a structural-functionalist orientation and a linear view of time while failing to represent accurately alternative post-structural and antistructural CSR paradigms. Building on an analysis of 40 reviews of the CSR field and on insights from the social studies of science, this paper revisits the notion of field re-presentation and highlights the need for building on categories, which embed a richer set of ontological assumptions to represent the CSR field in a manner that could maintain a dose of ontological and epistemological pluralism and diversity. We finally discuss the implications of our analysis to enhance CSR theorybuilding, cross-fertilize insights from distinct CSR paradigms and develop alternative assumptions to investigate empirically CSR phenomena
Hypothesis testing for Gaussian states on bosonic lattices
The asymptotic state discrimination problem with simple hypotheses is
considered for a cubic lattice of bosons. A complete solution is provided for
the problems of the Chernoff and the Hoeffding bounds and Stein's lemma in the
case when both hypotheses are gauge-invariant Gaussian states with
translation-invariant quasi-free parts.Comment: 22 pages, submitted versio
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
Relation between the Dynamics of the Reduced Purity and Correlations
A general property of the relation between the dynamics of the reduced purity
and correlations is investigated in quantum mechanical systems. We show that a
non-zero time-derivative of the reduced purity of a system implies the
existence of non-zero correlations with its environment under any unbounded
Hamiltonians with finite variance. This shows the role of local dynamical
information on the correlations, as well as the role of correlations in the
mechanism of purity change.Comment: 7 page
Stationary quantum source coding
In this paper the quantum source coding theorem is obtained for a completely
ergodic source. This results extends Shannon's classical theorem as well as
Schumacher's quantum noiseless coding theorem for memoryless sources. The
control of the memory effects requires earlier results of Hiai and Petz on high
probability subspaces.Comment: 8 page
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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 toward sustainability
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