Corporate Social Responsibility in Business and Management University Education: The Relevancy to the Business Practices in Bulgaria

Abstract

In the last decades corporate social responsibility (CSR) has forcefully and irreversibly become a part of the corporate actions of a growing number of companies and continues to provoke the interest of governments, international institutions, scientists and researchers. The new imperatives on CSR have increased the requirements of companies towards the education and preparation of experts with the requisite skills and competences.The objective of the paper is to discuss how business universities meet the demand for new business models and management skills in order to help companies in Bulgaria to develop socially responsible practices.The study is based on a web-content analysis of the curricula and study programs of all Bulgarian universities training business and management students in Bachelor and Master programs. The obtained results regarding the current status of CSR education are interpreted in the context of CSR in businesses in Bulgaria. To this end, results were used from a large-scale study by the authors on the status and trends of development of CSR in Bulgaria, thus uncovering the needs of companies operating on the Bulgarian market in terms of employees with CSR skills and competences, and showing the gap between the demand and supply of CSR education for business and management graduates in Bulgarian universities (Bachelor and Master programs). The conclusions delineate the directions in which teaching CSR-related issues should develop in higher education institutions in Bulgaria.

CSR in Educational Process of Tourism Study Program at the University of Economics Prague

“…Although the CSR topic has been discussed already for more than a half of the century, there is no universally valid and unified global definition. Several international and national organisations as well as experts and authors of scientific articles try to define CSR [8]. In the context of this research CSR was defined as a rather broad range of related subtopics (Ethics, Sustainable development, which is in accordance with findings of [10] and [11].…”

“…Current status of Corporate social responsibility implementation in management education has been a topic of many articles in the past years, which shows that the topic is subject of current debates in the industry. In [6] the situation at Spanish universities is evaluated, Vázquez [7] studied CSR students´ perception at Uruguay universities, [8] evaluated the situation at Bulgarian universities. The authors in [9] emphasize the importance of CSR as an integral part of education of future managers in the Czech Republic, and Adámek [10] analyses the extent of the wide range of CSR topics in education in the Czech Republic.…”

Corporate Social Responsibility through SDGs: Preliminary Results from a Pilot Study in Italian Universities

“…Although there is increasing awareness of the critical role universities have in corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation (MuijenHeidi 2004) and focusing the analysis on the research and teaching activities that incorporate and assimilate corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and sustainable development into their curricula (Setó-Pamies et al 2011;Doh and Tashman 2014;Sherif 2015;Slavova and Bankova 2015;Gulluscio and Torrecchia 2017;Nugra and Pesantez 2021) or on the activities of stakeholder engagement (Mehta 2011;Latif 2018;Aversano et al 2020), there is little available evidence on how, in practice, these entities have integrated social responsibility principles and sustainability criteria finalized at the achievement of sustainable development (SD) in their strategic planning and monitoring of their results. This trend seems to contradict the one that instead distinguishes the studies finalized to assess if universities are committed to their social responsibility, and if they provide sufficient information on CSR.…”