The visible hand of consultants in the construction of the markets for virtue: Translating issues, negotiating boundaries and enacting responsive regulations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the resurgence of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been described as the development of ‘markets for virtue’, little is known about the social construction of CSR markets. Prior works either focus on the economic potential of these markets or criticize the social commodification they reflect, denying them any virtue other than generating profit or maintaining the capitalist status quo. This article uses the case of the market for CSR consultancy in Québec to make ‘visible’ the hand of management consultants in the creation of markets for virtue. Building on interviews with 23 consultants and secondary data, we relate three narrative accounts that highlight complementary facets of the construction of the market for CSR consultancy. Our narratives shed light on three distinctive roles of CSR consultants as social and environmental issues translators, market boundary negotiators and responsive regulation enactors. These roles clarify the regulative dynamics underlying CSR commodification and advance our understanding of consultancy work in the CSR domain.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it