**3. Surfacing the ontological assumptions about corporate social responsibility**

The idea about CSR for UE-PG calls for the need for surfacing what could be its ontological positions. Drawing on powerful theories should allow for the better understanding and explanation by focusing on the role of agency. Critical realism philosophy and its argument for the study of reality as ontology challenge both the objective and socially constructed views about reality. Critical realist-oriented theories challenge the mainstream theories that are self-referential and are deontological. Such theories tend to be complacent about the natural necessity without fully addressing what might be the inadequacies of their claims. They tend to be dislocated from reality about a social reality/phenomenon and thus remain self-contained. They are more about surface ontology, that is, reducing the reality to the understanding and explanations thereof. To counter such a weakness, both critical realism philosophy and the realist social theory, as the explanatory program, allow the analyst to adopt a paradigm that is commensurable with the context and in ways that can be socially and culturally relevant and responsive. By the power of transcendence, the analyst is then able to question a type of science (pseudoscience) that selects what counts as reality and what reality to count to promote interests or socially constructed views.

**Table 1** suggests that corporate social responsibility can be understood and explained as an open and complex social system. Such systems take the three main elements of structure, culture, and agency. Drawing on the critical realist philosophy,


#### **Table 1.**

*The domains and social reality of corporate social responsibility as adapted from Dwayi [4].*

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

as the under laboring to the explanatory program as the social realism theory [2, 3] allows both for the understanding and the explanation of CSR for UE-PG as the interplay of systems at a particular point in time and space. The people inherit the conditions that aren't of their own making. As such, the present is always constituted from historical and social relations. For the future to possibly change for the better, that takes place through reflexivity and human action. Therefore, to surmise social realistoriented scholars, problem solving should entail the ability to engage the present in reflexive-dialectical processes that can allow for transformative agency to emerge.

The current challenges about CSR theories and practices, per already cited cases, call for the realist understanding of CSR as the agency as deep ontology, stratification, causal efficaciousness, and emergence. The social system elements of structure, culture, and agency (SCA) take two forms, the macro level, which is enduring because it derives from history and social relations, and the micro level, which can be enacted; hence it is regarded as the level of mediations. The explication of the elements of structure, culture, and agency (**Table 1**), firstly, as analytically distinct and secondly, as emergent from the three domains of reality, helps to accord the causal mechanism to each of the elements, including the power of agency as causally efficacious. In this regard, the personal emergent powers and properties (PEPPs) enable people to reflect upon their social context and to act reflexively toward it, either individually or collectively, objectively or subjectively. The significance of agency in resolving the problems about the primacy of structure in social science is when the PEPPs help humans to become active shapers of their socio-cultural contexts, rather than being the passive recipients thereof. Critical for social realism, therefore, is the question of how the chosen values and belief systems operate at the realm of agency [12].

Consequent to the first phase of the National Institutional Audits in South Africa (2008–2011), there was an increased voice from the critical realism scholars about the challenges of reporting about quality, when such reports can be seen to be drawing from de-ontological positions and self-referential explanations (details in the introductory section). As already indicated, the article does not seek to rewrite such a report but to focus on one such case of reporting by doing the critical realist analysis and the social realist account about the case of a historically disadvantaged university in South Africa. The main purpose is to advance the value of making a transcendental argument when engaging an issue as complex as evaluating and reporting about quality, incl the outlining of the challenges thereof, when engaging the topic CSR for UE-PG. Critical realist philosophy in terms of the domains of reality **Table 1** allows both for the principles and tools of analysis. The critical realist principles include judgmental rationality as the position against singular/single story explanations. The thinking tools thereof, namely, transfactuality, retroductive reasoning, and transcendental argument, allow for understanding of this philosophy as a metatheory, the tool about clearing the field or for under laboring the actual theory as the program of action, which is social realist theory. In this regard, social realism theory allows for the explanations of the social phenomenon (namely, corporate social responsibility) as interplays of structure, culture, and agency over time.

Therefore, the value of **Table 1**, as representative both of critical realism philosophy (the three domains about reality) and of social realism (the social world as structural, cultural, and human systems) is about thinking, hypothetically speaking, about the elements of structure, culture, and agency as analytically distinct and determining of causal efficaciousness (the relative weight of each element on the

other, especially structure, culture as sense and meaning making expressed as beliefs, norms, and standards). Because of the transitive and intransitive nature of the objects at the domain of the real, what then leads the critical oriented analyst is the transcendental question, that is, making an educated guess about,

*"What mechanisms must have been generating the kinds of the events and processes as those that are manifest at the domain of the actual and how the latter is further reflected as the empirical data?*

Therefore, one of the positions that make social realism to be a powerful explanatory program is the ability to apply its tools about rationality. One of those, relevant for the discussion, is transfactuality, that is, the ability to engage the assumption that, at empirical level, because the numbers are, or the statement is; the numbers or the statement thus serves as a measure of reality. Transfactuality allows for abductive logic as questioning the taken-for-granted views about what appears as empirical, because the observations and opinions at the domain of the empirical are the result of other two emergent layers (domain of the actual and the domain of the real) in non-deterministic and in irreducible ways. Therefore, this description of what the ontological assumptions can be about CSR for UE-PG seeks to foreground the role of agency (human system as choice or non-choices, as actions or no actions), which operates in dynamic relationships with the social and cultural systems, as indicated in **Table 1**.
