University social responsibility: the role of the media and its stakeholders

Abstract

This article analyzes the growing importance of University Social Responsibility (USR), driven by a change of vision on the part of the governing teams of academic institutions. This change materializes in various aspects. This paper focuses on how the University implements its principles of USR through communication with its stakeholders. After a bibliographic review, Universidad de Málaga is taken as a case study and different communicative actions are analyzed related to how this institution informs referring to its USR to different interest groups. The analysis deals with two different communicative scenarios: direct communication of the University via its corporate pages, and the communication of its efforts through the media. Both types of communicative actions have differentiated dimensions and are directed to heterogeneous interest groups and work on different missions. Therefore, they are different manifestations of the same objective, guided in both cases by the principle of coherence and correspondence between the two. The analysis of the institutional information of Universidad de Málaga shows the importance of this responsibility, in addition to the degree of adequacy or compliance with the principles of social responsibility, their vision and identity as an organization.