Abstract:

Higher education institutions (HEI) play a crucial role in building up a more sustainable world, not only as knowledge generators and disseminators, but more importantly, as active players in implementing social responsibility (SR) strategies and engaging students, staff and stakeholders in this endeavour. However, and despite the amount of research developed in the last decades showing the importance of corporate websites as marketing tools to communicate approaches to social responsibility, research also shows that in the particular context of higher education, institutions are missing the opportunity to improve informational transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and ultimately, reputation, through their websites. These are being largely discussed as key marketing tools to share their commitment to sustainability and social responsibility. Researchers claim that universities show little commitment to disclosing SR information online and, at the same time, acknowledge that studies on the topic are still scarce (Nejati et al, 2011; Sánchez, Bolivar & López-Hernández, 2013). Hence, aiming at contributing to the discussion of social responsibility in HEIs, particularly that of communicating social responsibility, this paper analyses, on one hand, whether, and how, Portuguese HEI promote and communicate their SR strategies and practices to internal and external stakeholders through online disclosure. On a second hand, and following Nejati, Shafaei, Salamzadeh and Daraei (2011) call for further research, we take into consideration the nature of universities as being public or private, to identify if there are differences in their SR communication strategy and which ones are more concerned about communicating their practices through online disclosure. From a target population of 319 public and private institutions registered in the Portuguese Directorate-General for Higher Education, a non-probabilistic purposive sample was employed. Taking the highest number of students as key condition, corporate websites from top five private HEIs and top five public HEIs were analysed, regardless of region, area of studies, or study cycle. A content analysis was then performed to the websites of the 10 biggest Portuguese HEIs, in terms of number of students. The present research contributes to our understanding of how HEIs use online marketing tools to communicate their SR strategies and practices and elaborates on this issue by exploring their website contents regarding three dimensions: online publication of sustainability reports, presence or absence of a section dedicated to sustainability and/or social responsibility, and lastly, identification and analysis of which dimension (social, economic and environmental) is most explored and communicated.

Keywords:

Higher Education Institutions, Social Responsibility, Communication and Marketing, online disclosure.