**1. Introduction**

In this article, I argue 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. As it were, the concept seems to be more about the espoused value of relevance and responsiveness from an excusable position of the private goods. This seems to be the case in how the private organizations need to defend their existence by making it a point that profit making does not uncontrollably escalate in the face of abject poverty, increasing unemployment, and widening inequalities (PUI). The global economic crisis of 2008–2012, especially in the Global North, has taught us that the claims that the market rules might be about chasing a mirage. In several cases, the State had to intervene in preventing the complete collapse of capitalism, thus bringing into a sharp contrast the claim that capitalism is self-regulatory, is best for society, and must be left unto its own device. In this article, I argue that even in the public university education sector, where public accountability and institutional autonomy may be constitutionally protected along the academic rights and freedoms, such freedoms cannot be dispensed without maximum levels of responsibility. While university education is ostensibly about the public good (UE-PG), it looks like, in some cases, it can easily become the case of pretense, grandstanding, and political posturing. As I argue elsewhere [2], it could be the case when the leadership, management, and government systems can undermine the very principles of integrity, trust, good reputation, and legitimacy as espoused in the code for corporate governance and reporting. In those, and similar, cases, institutional rights and individual freedoms cannot remain uncontested. As I argue in this article, such rights and freedoms must be mediated, if, indeed, the UE-PG is also constitutive of corporate social responsibility, as it ought to be.

Therefore, the potential irresponsibility in the university education context, which can entail sacrificing the scholarship project because of systems of domination and control, and their dominant explanations about quality, need to be problematized. Such cases of being complicit in the perpetuation of social disadvantage and exclusion can take place when the compliance modes of thinking, making, and doing have as their source the abuse of power, whose source is historic privilege and advantage. This project was motivated by the need for the defense of the academic project in general and academic leadership against the onslaught of populism, which can masquerade as quality. Silences about what ought to matter in academic leadership run the risk of being over-shadowed by the complexity of power relations in the politics of knowledge and of being. Institutional management and governance structures can be the worst culprits in such situations, resulting in claims about quality bordering on pretense, grandstanding, and political posturing! The South African university transformation context displays such a complexity of social systems in quite strange ways, the ways which I prefer to refer to as the Contradictory Totality of a Special type. While there is a unity of purpose at the macro level, there is always a diversity of implementation at the micro level, which then becomes an interesting area of scholarly focus by critical realist-oriented researchers and practitioners. It can become a fiercely fought-for project, through reflexively dialectical processes, so that such engagements must ultimately allow for transformative agency to emerge!

Previous studies linked to the study of the category of Historically Disadvantaged Universities (HDUs) in South Africa revealed serious cases of mistrust, poor reputation, and illegitimacy both in the institutional academic project and, worse still, in the management and governance structures. Such cases could be claimed as antithetical to the idea of university education as a public good, when quality enhancement

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

constitutes the focus of critical analysis. In such contexts of historical and structural disadvantage, quality ought to be the actual measure about the public and common good. However, given the complex history of university education in South Africa, this means that quality can remain a contested issue along power and materialist interests. Such would be the contested issues about quality when the subject must be problematized against the perspectives of systems of domination and control coupled with their dominant explanations of what can be claimed as quality. This is what the article therefore focuses on, how a report about quality can masquerade as actual quality when the opposite might be true. Surfacing the latter as contradictions of Being and Becoming, by means of a social realist theory, which is anchored on the critical realist philosophy, allows for identifying the nature of these contradictions at systemic levels. Such contradictions play out in dynamics of structural and cultural systems, which, by their interactions with human systems as the common factor, allow for what might be the actual truth about quality and thus what kinds of choices and emancipatory projects can be embarked upon to potentially address the contradictions.

Practically, the article addresses corporate social responsibility as revolving around two main questions, *Relevance to What* and *Responsiveness to Whom?* About university education, the questions become whose power and whose truth? Through these questions as idea markers, the discussion, therefore, has as its focus and context corporate social responsibility, where the outcome ought to be both a public good (the currency that university education provides) and access to such goods. Integrated quality management systems, therefore, become the mechanism, the means to an end.

By this study, I did a content analysis of standards 4 and 9 where the choice was informed by the idea of quality as a cultural system (belief, ideas, standards, and norms, that is, standard 9, about coherence, functionality, reasonable, and meaningfully structured) and as a dialectical relationship with the structural system (roles, functions, and responsibilities, that is, standard 4, about governance structures, management, and academic leadership), both of which are enacted by agency. A consideration of the academic leadership allowed for understanding the more viable and sustainable quality management system as emerging, "corporateness" from below, that is, when quality is more owned by the faculty than prescribed by policies and strategies. What is of critical importance to the realist is causal efficacy, the weighted role of each element of structure, culture, and agency, from what occurs as events and processes further to how such events are experienced at the level of the empirical domain [2, 3]. However, while the structural is quite enduring, the most important measure for a social phenomenon (the idea of university education as a public good) is by means of a cultural system, an integrated quality management system assessed as coherent, functional, reasonable, and meaningfully structured, which can only be possible when enacted by a transformative agency. The power of analytical dualism is to treat each of the structural system and the cultural system as analytically distinct!

The main finding about this comparison was that the ranking of standards 4 and 9 of the WSU SER, when compared with other data about the institutional quality management culture, revealed social practices (silences and superficialities) of evaluating and reporting about quality as not responsible enough about what ought to matter about the idea of university education as a public good! The complexity of such a cultural system was mired in dynamic relations with the structural system and how explicating the role of human system, through reflexive-dialectical processes, tends to result more in reproductive outcomes than in the idea of transformative outcomes. Specifically, the study was based on the contents of reporting about quality by juxtaposition of two main variables,


From a social realist perspective, the variables constituted governance, strategic planning, leadership, and management as a structural system, on one hand, and integrated quality assurance system measured as a cultural system, on the other hand. Therefore, the case of accounting for quality, as the idea of university education as a public good, would be regarded as incomplete about other compelling cases about quality. The WSU SER claims have confirmed similar cases about the study of HDUs in the South African transformation project [4]. These are the cases where mistrust instead of trust, poor reputation instead of good, and illegitimacy can remain endemic governance and leadership challenges. Only when the right choices and emancipatory projects can be embarked upon as dynamic forms of institutional culture that reimagining corporate social responsibility might be a new possibility for the public and common good. That will be the practical dimension of the study.

Theoretically, it becomes the case when accounts about the social phenomenon can inadvertently and unwittingly draw on theories that draw on de-ontological positions and self-referential explanations than what the social realist explanations, based on critical realist philosophy, can allow for.

The analysis then takes a particular focus on scholarship of engagement as the potential exercise of transformative agency where the core business of community engagement and partnerships, of learning and teaching, and of research innovation make for the example of the necessary constructs and discourses for corporate social responsibility constructs. The scholarly engagement of the constructs as discourses, in the contexts of university education and its espoused value for the public and common good, albeit with demonstrable silences about the critical construct of scholarship of engagement, coupled with glaring superficialities as evidenced by the cited crisis events in one case of an institution, allowed for what could be finally declared as the exploratory research whose value was to build on similar studies in other countries [5]. The significance of such exploratory research is thus to advance what ought to be the CSR theorization and conceptualization in social contexts and their expressively veracious considerations.

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, ought to learn to work in ways that can 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.

Therefore, this article is organized around the basic logic of reproduction-understanding-broadening-advancement in research. While CSR is generally understood to be a private sector terrain, its mainstream practices need to be theorized in contextspecific ways, especially for the university education sector, which is fast embracing business management models as part of its governance and leadership systems. Such broadening strategies about the concept will advance the scholarship about the concept, especially in consideration of what could be value addition when the idea of university education as a public and common good can be understood as dialectically related to corporate social responsibility. As such, the article is structured according to the following main sections,

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

