**5. The critical realist analysis: the role players in scholarship of engagement**

The National Framework for Institutional Quality Audits explained the next phase of the institutional national audits ([10], p. 27) as follows:

*"Self-evaluation needs to be understood as a meaning-making activity, and all levels and categories of staff, as well as units such as faculties and departments across the institution and across all sites of delivery, should participate, even though the professional quality assurance staff manage the process".*

In Section 3 of this article, the following extract referred to the case of "The 2018/19 Factor":

*"The writing of the SER commenced during the last quarter of 2021. It was anchored by five professors and the Institutional Student Representative Council (ISRC) President, under the auspices of the Quality Management Directorate" ([13]; p. x).*

#### **5.1 The WSU self-evaluation report and the three directorates**

According to **Table 6**, the ranking parameters allow for the institution to be able to reflect on how it manages its integrated quality management systems according to each variable. The ranking parameters are briefly outlined below:


**Table 3** reflects how the WSU team rated the SER and how the Focus Areas 1 and 3 reflect the nature of integrated quality management systems as enacted by governance, strategic planning, management, and leadership. Thus, 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, reasonableness, and meaningfully structured) as a dialectical relationship with the structural system. While the cultural system is meant the beliefs, ideas, standards, and norms, that is, Standard 9 about coherence, functionality, reasonable and meaningfully structured, the structural system, on the other hand, is meant the roles, functions, and responsibilities, that is Standard 4 about governance structures, management, and academic leadership. It is worth noting that both systems are enacted by agency (**Table 1**). A consideration of the academic leadership allows 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 the causal efficacy, the weighted role of each element of structure, culture, and agency, to what occurs as events and processes, further to how such events are experienced at the level of the empirical domain (**Table 1**). However, while the structure 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!

Also, the potential strength of comparing the two focus areas was for the value of internal coherence. When one focus area is cross-referenced with the other, the data self-triangulate. Such triangulation should entail not only the completion of the claims across different focus areas of the report but also the confirmation in ways that can allow the analysis to possibly arrive, in an abductive logical way, to more credible and trustworthy findings and conclusions about the data (the value of abductive/ retroductive reasoning is explained in Section 3 of this article). For the purposes of the discussion in this section, the Focus Areas 1 and 3 allowed for the delineation of two important aspects. Focus Area 1 allowed for the concept of corporate social responsibility and the structural system of roles, functions, and responsibilities. This is the terrain of governance structures, management, and academic leadership. Focus area 3 allowed for the idea of quality as a public and common good and how such good is made accessible to all when the integrated systems can be ranked along coherence, functionality, reasonableness, and meaningful structured. The critical realist analysis of the Standards 4 and 9, which constitute these focus areas, therefore potentially allowed for the account of the nature of the interplay between the elements of structure, culture, and agency for analytical purposes only, where agency, in terms of ranking parameters, could be compared with other forms of data about the same systems and, in that way, reveal the inadequacies of the claims in accounting for quality. Such a project is about the beyondness, that is, beyond the surface ontology about what works and does not work about quality management as the measure of the public good. It is about the focus on the conditions of enablement and constraints of the access to such good. Social realism as reflected in **Table 1** enables the social analyst and researcher to address the interplay of structure, culture, and agency at the domain of the real (stratified reality by means of deep ontology), as causal efficaciousness and effectiveness and therefore as emergent at the two domains above

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

(domain of the actual and domain of the empirical)! Where such an analysis results in reproductive outcomes about quality, such a case should be problematized by identifying the potential constraints about agency if the more transformative outcomes might constitute the realms of new possibilities.

Therefore, both the organizing principle about scholarship of engagement and the role players in it as the 3 directorates, as reflected in the SER content, evidenced about Focus Areas 1 and 3 (about the reported quality management systems), allowed for the critical realist analysis and its advocacy for the transcendental reasoning. Calling on the mixed methodology and triangulation (that is, checking for the completion of data, confirmation of the stated claims about quality by cross-checking with other data sources and, most importantly, retroductive reasoning) helped the realist-oriented analysis to arrive at credible findings and conclusions about the potential case of corporate social responsibility where quality ought to be the measure of the public good.

The main finding of 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 the quality as not responsible enough for what ought to matter in the idea of university education as a public good! The complexity of such a cultural system was mired in the dynamic relations with the structural system and how explicating the role of the human system, through reflexive-dialectical processes, tends to result more in reproductive outcomes than the idea of transformative outcomes.
