Higher education and social responsibility : quality management perspectives : student workbook

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has evolved over time and now it is concerned to a wide range of organisations given the market character of the environment with its emphasis on globalisation and competition. At the same time, in an increasingly networked and globalised world, classical quality challenges evolve in a new context, with strong focus on socially responsible and sustainable stakeholder value. Plenty of CSR issues in terms of applications and relevant practices lately refer to a wide range of tactical level tools and approaches that can benefit greatly from quality framework. In this context, many educational institutions are trying to adopt a more business-like orientation to accomplish the changes. Despite the evolving debate concerning CSR and sustainability in higher education institutions and its direct link to quality assurance and quality enhancement, practical guidelines for CSR encouragement in universities through proactive involvement of primary higher education quality stakeholders remain unclear. The purpose of this book and, in parallel, the proposed course on Quality Management in Master’s degree programs is to develop understanding of CSR integrated quality philosophies, quality management methods and tools, which are synthesised and applied in contemporary organisations to ensure high quality of socially responsible performance and excellence in products and services, particularly focusing on higher education institutions, i.e. universities. The book provides additional practices with insights of modern views on quality as holistic management, responsibility and integrity tailored to classical approaches. It specifically addresses the CSR focused proactive engagement of primary higher education quality stakeholders (i.e. Master’s degree students) in the process of managing quality and performance excellence particularly at universities through participatory active learning methods: problem-based learning, discussion-based teaching, brainstorming, panel discussions, exploratory practical tasks based on critical analysis. Each topic is developed with continuous learning tasks, addressed to acquire demanded competencies for managing quality and performance excellence and develop skills for finding innovative CSR-based quality management solutions for particular quality programme development. In line with issuing a challenge for primary higher education stakeholders by proactive engagement in creative study programme quality improvement process, it gives an opportunity of examining responsibility for quality in higher education on their own both from theoretical and practical backgrounds.