Exploratory study about achievements and issues of university social responsibility — “USR” as a dynamic process

Abstract

“University Social Responsibility”, commonly abbreviated as USR, is a term that was created at the beginning of the 2000 s. The term USR was advocated by the inspiration of “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)” under the rapid progression of globalization. CSR is understood as being a corporate management way through which a company achieves a balance of economic, environmental, and social imperatives, while at the same time addressing the needs of stakeholders. Hence this term includes an idea of corporate management and competition theory. In this respect, USR can be said to differ from previously used terms to discuss universities’ roles and missions. Positioning this point as a property of USR, this study focused on this term. This is a literature review that aims to extract features of USR based on its nature and to consider achievements and issues. This study classified the research topics using the text mining method first and dug deep changes in the research trends by reading papers that were selected along with those topics carefully. As a result, three features were detected: a dynamic process on the practice base, a methodology to design corporative university management, and a top-down style concept. The concept of USR differed depending on the social situation in each country, while USR has converged as a way to meet the demands of social contribution to universities in the practice process. Since around 2018, there has been a trend toward improving the substantial quality of education while intending to differentiate from other universities.