The integration of social responsibility and sustainability in practice: Exploring attitudes and practices in Higher Education Institutions

Abstract

The demands placed on Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to deliver sustainability initiatives alongside their long-standing social responsibility commitments has been recognised in literature. However, how these interrelate in practice continues to be relatively unexplored. The extant literature suggests that the integration of the two connected agendas can be problematic due to a range of factors, including a general lack of awareness or even misconceptions of the respective agendas. This paper explores the attitudes and practices related to the integration of social responsibility and sustainability initiatives at HEIs. Theoretically, this study highlights the ongoing relative positioning and importance of economic factorsas it relates to differentiation rather than integrationover others such as social responsibility and sustainability. The main implication of this study is that provide useful insights into how HEIs can closer integrate two contemporary but potentially competing agendas.

Review of empirical research on university social responsibility

“…This research has several contributions to add to the existing USR literature. Firstly, consistent with the suggestion of Larrán Jorge et al (2016) and Filho et al (2019), the findings emphasized that the essential role of USR implementation for modern universities is to attain sustainability, which has been stated by several studies measuring education institutions' sustainability (Filho et al , 2019; Larrán Jorge et al , 2016). Additionally, to answer the second research question, this paper has also clarified the main interest topics of USR implementation globally by dividing it into two separate regions.…”

“…Thus, adopting USR can help enhance effective university governance to better resolve conflicts among internal and external stakeholders. In addition, increasing the commitment of university top management to organizational governance obligation will promote HEIs to meet better results regarding sustainability as well as university performance (Filho et al , 2019; Larrán Jorge et al , 2016).…”

¿Son las universidades socialmente responsables?

“…La manera de dirigir la universidad ha ido cambiando a lo largo del tiempo. A fecha de hoy la dirección estratégica en la universidad se centra en la sostenibilidad (Aleixo et al, 2018), los ODS (Shulla et al, 2020) y la RSU (Dowsett, 2020;Filho et al, 2019). Para incorporar estos principios a la universidad son de gran utilidad las herramientas de dirección estratégica (Llinàs-Audet et al, 2011;Sánchez et al, 2020).…”

“…Una institución se define por su misión (Drucker, 2012). Cuando la RSU se incorpora a la misión, visión y valores, se materializa en su plan estratégico (Dowsett, 2020;Filho et al, 2019;Larrán Jorge et al, 2015) y en la forma en el que se implementa, ejecuta y controla, asegurando canales de retroalimentación que permiten la mejora continua (de Sousa et al, 2020;Karwowska, 2019).…”

“…La Responsabilidad Social Universitaria (RSU) se define como el compromiso que asume la universidad frente a sus grupos de interés (de Sousa et al, 2020;Ferrero-Ferrero et al, 2018) y que genera el cambio para lograr la transformación social (Păunescu et al, 2017), política (Chile & Black, 2015) y económica (Chan et al, 2021) que demanda la sociedad hacia un desarrollo humano más sostenible (Aleixo et al, 2018;Filho et al, 2019).…”