Social Responsibility at Universities

Abstract

Despite the fact that there has been an increase in the number of reports related to Social Responsibility practices published by universities, the content of these reports is unbalanced and heterogeneous. Social Responsibility reports have a problem with the evaluation and comparison of the university’s results achieved in this area. The main goal of this paper is to analyze different universities’ reports in order to obtain the information necessary to identify to which extent these reports are comparable to each other. A content analysis has been carried out by analyzing six different Catalan universities as a case study. Findings show that there are important differences in the structure and the content of these reports. With this information a basic guideline for the structure of these reports is proposed with the aim of improving the capacity to compare these documents and thus, the social responsibility of universities. The results of this study can be used as a tool to attract both students and investors to these universities.