**2. University education transformation in South Africa, the contradictory totality of a special type**

Conceptually, and for the purpose of the discussion in this article, a multidimensional understanding of university responsibility about quality as a scholarship of engagement is mapped out as follows:


Scholarship of engagement as the organizing principle for the academic project promises the potential answer about the academic project as the measure of quality in the following three ways,


The very notion of corporateness is all about both emergence and irreducibility. While the sum of the parts ought to count in consideration of ecosystems, some systems cannot be fully understood by means of reductionist thinking. For that reason, it makes a scholarly imperative that university education for the public good (UE-PG), as a concept, ought to matter when dialectically related with corporate social responsibility (CSR) and why the relationship can be problematic at systemic levels. As it were, challenges about corporate social responsibility, both as a concept and a theorized practice, are well documented in the contemporary literature, ranging from claims about the complete absence of agency theory [5] to the limited application of the agency theory in such fields as corporate governance, firm ownership, and born global firms. The areas of practice seem to include a range of areas, from corporate governance, firm ownership, and born global firms to the fields, which include impact examination of top management characteristics, board structure, ownership by domestic investors, foreign investors, business group firms, family ownership, state ownership on the firm internationalization decisions, etc. [6]. However, university education is not for profit institutions, although the long-term goal might be for the private goods. For the latter reason, and in consideration of the role of university education or higher education and training as a common and public good, a critical question arises, what corporate social responsibility ought to mean in their context for the access to such goods? It ought to be so because the intellectual project that constitutes the idea of university education is all about engagement as a concept, a belief system, albeit not as a value-free exercise. In such an engagement, the approach should always try to avoid what could be conflation or reification. Such forms of reification, for example, the assumption that claims about corporate social responsibility constitute the proxy for social justice and equity, may have to be problematized by drawing from critical realist ways of thinking.

Therefore, a social justice project that seeks to reflect university as a public good ought to adopt a kind of descriptive analysis that reflects these complex issues about a social phenomenon. As such, a transcendental argument can be made in ways that the actual reality about a social phenomenon, namely, CSR for UE-PG, cannot be reduced to the events thereof and further to the experience or observations of those involved. Corporate social responsibility in the context of university education and for the public good (CSR for EU-PG) ought to be about beyond-ness. Beyond just the operational effectiveness and efficiency variables about business, it ought to be about a values-driven moral and ethical stand, including impact tracking for sustainable value creation. Against this brief overview about the ontological assumptions about CRS for UE-PG, not much is researched and documented in what could be alternative practical explanations beyond the taken-for-granted concepts [2, 3].

Therefore, in response to two recent claims, [2, 3], the engagement of the social world from the realist social theory allows for understanding and explanation of the social phenomenon as a dialectical relationship of structure, culture, and agency. It requires the understanding of the interplays of the latter in analytically distinct ways. In that regard, this article contributes to the fast-increasing body of knowledge, by focusing on the value of agency as the subject of research. Therefore, the related questions, as the motivation for the critical realist-oriented research project, in this article, are:


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

Toward deconstructing these conceptual and contextual issues, it is quite significant to note that the South African university education system, almost three decades post constitutional democracy, continues to be fragmented especially when in consideration of the academic performance profiles [7, 8]. To the critical realist-oriented scholars and practitioners, this is the case of a contradictory totality. In explaining contradictory totality, [1] declares that,

*"The unity (of a social structure) is derived from the fact that nature is the 'inorganic body' of human thought and action, with which human beings 'must remain in continual interchange' if they 'are not to die', humanity being 'a part of nature."*

The unity of purposes derives from the common view about what university education is for, in the South African context for developmental imperatives. The diversity from such a unitary view arises when the idea of university education is not just about the public good but also a human rights issue and how those rights can be enacted. Contradictions, therefore, become more manifest when in consideration of the institutional performance profiles, and the degenerative mechanisms about UE-PG in argument about how university education is potentially antithetical to the ideals of corporate social responsibility.

#### **2.1 Continuities from the old regimes of power and of truth**

Post 2000 in South Africa, the most enduring question about the constitutional democracy is the whole debate about the national welfarist versus the developmental state, with the latter being imposed on the university education role and the resultant identity and performance crisis. HDUs are still struggling to give full expression about EU-PG idea as corporate social responsibility. The regional challenges about HDUs continue to be about their role, which would turn out to be more about the access and massification of HET rather than the actual economic development of the communities in which they were positioned/operating from. HDUs' academic project systems would not be internally integrated enough, hence the regional integration challenges that reinforce the HDU status. The role of community outreach and engagement, partly informed by the global trends about the creation of "the metropolitan university models as the response to the inner-city decline" ([9], p. 297), emerged in university education studies especially in the context of the national democratic revolution. "The policy debates about the role of universities in society took place at the local, so that these institutions could become more relevant to equitable development in their contexts," ([9], p. 309). On the other hand, the value of university education as knowledge constitutive is still challenged at the micro level as indicated in the RSA university education profiles [7, 8], where the third lowest band of universities is still enduring.

The challenge for universities affected by the HDU phenomenon and the basic principles of institutional learning where the simple solutions in the form of current knowledges and skills assessment must be able to translate into the economic value add about the regional integration question. This then refers to the need for individual abilities (individual agency) to become institutional capabilities (corporate agency) where the institution must be able to engage its complex challenges in ways that can be more responsive and relevant to regional challenges. The failure in such a project continues to be the case of stagnation about such universities and of pretense by its management and leadership systems [4].

Therefore, how scholarship of engagement would have to provide the right explanations about quality as relations of macro and micro politics in the context makes for this important question about quality as epistemic logic. That would refer to the idea, values, presuppositions, and belief systems about knowledge that need to be made explicit if the complexity of power relations in the politics of knowledge and of being might be finally resolved. This would have to be the point of resistance and transformative political action in the academic project as a form of micro politics. Such politics would have to take the counter hegemonic narratives toward truth that can enhance each one of participants in the university project and in ways such that opportunities for humanity can be elevated! It is this "blackness" that reflects a particular phenomenon of the HDUs, which operate through the structured racist apartheid system, and its spatial planning and social exclusion policies, used to operate in the "Bantustans" or black communities. Among these communities, there is also a particular feature of the then Homelands, in which such universities were established as a form of ostensibly free communities, when the then racist Nationalist party of South Africa would grant self-governance (Homelands). The enduring challenges of power and privilege make such institutions continue admitting students from predominantly working-class families (SWCF). This is the category of students that, due to the socio-economic conditions, cannot afford to be admitted in affluent universities, be it historically white and advantaged or historically Black but relatively advantaged. Such is the confluence of forces that can militate against the mainstream notions of quality, and therefore of responsibility, along the complexity of power and privilege.
