Abstract:

Traditionally, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) expresses a situation in which firms adopt a broader business view and take responsibility for their impact on society (Carroll, 1979) including the economic, environmental and social dimension (Elkington, 1994). While some firms start to develop their strategies focusing in CSR, recent discussions in the Higher Education (HE) context query the contribution of University Social Responsibility (USR) (Muijen, 2004).

This research proposes a modelling framework for student base analysis in faculties of Social Sciences in courses devoted to Economy and Business Management. In our opinion, Universities should not only do some add-on philanthropic things, but should change their strategies and really build the USR approach into their management activities and also into their education and research programs. What we see now is that only some Universities are starting to have a clear ambition related to USR and only some of them are committed to accountability by publishing sustainability reports.

According to the model proposed, to be able to optimize their positive impact in society and also to reduce negative impact if needed, HE Institutions have to use a long-term horizon perspective and involve all stakeholders in their strategy development, especially students. The figure of the internal social entrepreneur (Austin et al., 2005; Kistruck and Beamish, 2010) at the University emerges as a guarantee of endogenous development of responsibility in HE Institutions.

Keywords:

Higher Education, Corporate Social Responsibility, University Social Responsibility, Internal Social Entrepreneur.