DETUROPE - The Central European Journal of Regional Development and Tourism 2021, 13(3):58-72 | DOI: 10.32725/det.2021.019
The paper investigates university social responsibility at Hungarian universities by examining their websites. Although the concept of university social responsibility has existed for nearly 20 years, the scope of its research and theoretical literature still falls far short of that of corporate social responsibility. There is extant literature on the topic including case studies from around the world showing the importance of university social responsibility. Nevertheless, the scope of thematic analysis of the topic is very narrow with only a few pieces of comprehensive systematic research published so far, and the theoretical literature only highlights the work of some major researchers. Due to the complexity of the topic, the amount of previous literature attempting to explore the effects of university social responsibility is also limited. The aim of this paper is to investigate how terms relating to social responsibility appear on the websites of Hungarian universities. In autumn 2019 research was carried out involving twenty-one universities. The paper analyses how social responsibility is visible on university websites based on given keywords. The research employed quantitative content analysis. The hypothesis was that based on visibility the same university categories can be formed according to the size and profile of the institutions. According to the authors' present knowledge no such research has been carried out in Hungary so far. There are some university website researches in different countries but with different purposes with the special focus on sustainability. So the method of the present research is an attempt to find out how to measure the social responsibility visibility of universities and how to make categorizations based on the analyses. The limitation of the research is, among others, that universities have different search engines on their websites, which can lead to the misinterpretation of results. The main findings are that the visibility of social responsibility based on website analyses depends not only on the size and profile of the institutions; therefore, the investigation of visibility can contribute to the creation of new categories proving that social responsibility is far beyond the size or profile of the universities. The findings can help institutions develop the conscious communication of their social responsibility activity, and provide assistance to the research community.
Published: February 1, 2022 Show citation
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