**7. Conclusion**

This article reported on academic project functions, in one case of a comprehensive university in South Africa, as published in the self-evaluation report. The advent of the national institutional audit (2021–2024), the second one post constitutional democracy, allowed for the potential analysis of the value of understanding the role of agency in the theory and practice of corporate social responsibility for the idea of university education as a public and common good. The enduring social ills in the form of abject poverty, increasing unemployment rates, and the escalating inequalities on a global scale cast doubts about the agenda for human flourishing in general and about the globally celebrated constitutional democracies and their Bill of Rights. The consistent question for South African transformation project of university education is about corporate social responsibility: *relevance to what and responsive to whom?*

The article was organized around the main argument that corporate social responsibility (CSR), both as a concept and a subject of inquiry, still needs several iterative cycles of theorization and research if the concept is to reach high levels of intellectual maturity. This need is more than urgent in the context of university education in the HDUs' case in South Africa, where the measure of the public good, and of how to access such goods, needs to be developmental imperatives. The university education sector in South Africa, having completed the first phase of the National Institutional Audits (2008–2011), is in the middle of the second phase (2021–2024) but with strong evidence for the enduring concerns, claims, and issues about quality whose history is rooted in the legacy of a socially exclusive system. Therefore, the article seeks to contribute to, and expand on, the necessary conversations that, through reflexivedialectical processes, can allow for a transformative agency to emerge.

The main goal of this project was to engender and stimulate the necessary conversations in similar contexts but without being deterministic. Contemporary scholarship about corporate social responsibility should seek to advance the context-specific and actor-driven ways of engaging corporate social responsibility as a multidimensional concept, with realms of new possibilities for the public good. For this article, CSR for UE-PG takes a particular dimension of scholarship of engagement as the realm of quality as logic, power matrix, and the idea of being/ontology. As such, quality can be contested along the ideas, beliefs, norms, and standards that always reflect power dynamics.

The research value for such an exercise, as scholarship, entails promotion of a cultural system about CSR for UE-PG. Specifically, it is about how the institutional units, which can be designed and managed to work in discrete and fragmented ways, and how such units can learn to work in ways that promote collaboration and partnerships. The net result is organizational learning at all performance levels of operations, business, and strategy, including the potential relevance and responsiveness of the institution to the local, regional, and national developmental imperatives.

*Reimagining Corporate Social Responsibility in the Idea of University Education as the Public… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.110177*
