Toward the Dissemination of Sustainability Issues through Social Media in the Higher Education Sector: Evidence from an Italian Case

Elena Gori,Silvia Fissi,Marco Contri,Alberto Romolini

doi:10.3390/su12114658

Elena Gori, Silvia Fissi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12114658

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Abstract

Nowadays, universities play a pivotal role in building a more sustainable society, promoting sustainable development by reducing the negative impacts of their activities. Accordingly, universities have been incorporating sustainability into the different dimension of their activities (i.e., campus operations, research, teaching, and community engagement). Against this backdrop, the active involvement of stakeholders is a critical element, and, in this regard, social media platforms are particularly well-suited tools thanks to their inherent dialogic features. While there are several studies on the implementation of sustainability within university activities, only a few previous researches explore whether and how such institutions use social media platforms (SM) to disclose their green initiatives and engage users. Based on this, our paper aims to fill the literature gap by exploring the case of the University of Florence. To achieve this aim, we performed a content analysis of the posts published by the university on Facebook. In contrast with prior studies which found scarce use of SM to share green activities in the higher education sector, our findings reveal that the University of Florence has been using SM to disclose their sustainability initiatives. Moreover, our results suggest that most posts are related to the community engagement dimension, while previous research pointed out prevalent attention to the environmental aspect. Finally, this research reveals a low interaction level between the university and its followers, which greatly hampers the dialogic potential of social platforms themselves.

Highlights

In recent years, governments, public companies and private firms have paid increasing attention to sustainability issues, incorporating them into their strategies [1]
Social media platforms (SM) are well-suited for fostering dialogic communication, which refers to the process in which one party interacts with another in a two-way dialogue through digital platforms in which both parties can exchange information, opinions, and experiences [37]
This study focuses on FB because it is the most used social media globally with 2.44 billion active users [61] and because the University has activated an additional FB profile dedicated to sustainability issues

Summary

Introduction

Governments, public companies and private firms have paid increasing attention to sustainability issues, incorporating them into their strategies [1]. In this regard, Cooper and Gorman [2] highlighted that universities can actively contribute to global sustainable development by developing knowledge through research and offering students high-quality training paths. In the 1980s only a few universities considered it relevant for their activities, even if they found some difficulties [8]; today an increasing number of higher education institutions around the world have integrated sustainability into their own planning, marketing, and communication challenges [9,10]. Agostino and Arnaboldi [14] (p. 1292) highlighted that social media “is a broad concept that [...] includes [s] a whole variety of different networking sites, such as Facebook, micro-blogging services like Twitter, blogs, photo sharing and video sharing websites like YouTube or Flickr.” Some studies have shown that, except for rare cases of excellence, organizations often use social media in a traditional way (i.e., asymmetrical and top-down) [15,16], without activating an effective two-way communication with stakeholders [17]

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