The Culture Of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) In The Academic Framework: Some Literary Implications

Abstract

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is swiftly emerging as an integral part of corporate culture and discourse. Associated with notions of responsibility, accountability and community involvement, it remains privileged with concerns that increasingly define the new millennium. Less developed, however, is the relevance of CSR ideas to academic communities. For universities to shrug away from CSR concerns would be to deny an essential precondition of the academic framework – accountability to the stakeholder - in this case, the students and the immediate community at large. This paper attempts to contextualize the role of the universities within the wider concerns of CSR.. While establishing the background of CSR studies, the emergence of academic involvement will also be reflected upon and finally, an example of the way in which accountability could be achieved in the literature programs of English departments will be presented to indicate ways in which literary curricula could be better aligned with the priorities of the larger, ever-expanding concerns of global literature.