Investigation in the context of corporate social responsibility and institutional theory: A research on universities

The subject of this study is to examine the conceptual knowledge and examples of the social responsibility practices of state and foundation universities in Ankara, İstanbul, İzmir, Konya and Antalya which are included in the Turkish Higher Education System and to gain legitimacy and the legitimacy contribution of the concept of corporate social responsibility. Different organizational issues, which have been discussed many times with institutional point of view, have been studied by researchers. According to the institutional set-up, according to the environmental conditions in an organization, after a while, they resemble their competitors and as a result they go to common practices. In recent years, charities campaigns have been part of a variety of moral and social responsibility campaigns to show that organizations are not merely profit-making structures in the eyes of their customers. This led to the emergence of the concept of CSR. The issue of working to put forward the importance of such an important concept in terms of organizations and to show the importance of CSR studies has been determined as CSR. This study is aimed at revealing how the universities differ from each other in terms of CSR studies and practices that they have made in order to gain legitimacy. In the first part of the research, the concepts such as the emergence of theoretical theory, institutional infrastructure, ethics, and the concept of legitimacy are discussed. In the second part of the research, history and development of institutions of higher education in Turkey are discussed. In the third part of the research, it was mentioned that the classification of CSR applications of the higher education institutions covered in the study for this research was made a classification tool by making the replications of the materials in the United Nations Global Compact. It has benefited from the United Nations Global Compact in order to put CSR studies that each university has implemented into a standard and apply a template. The ten articles contained in the convention and the structural situation found in Turkey were put together and four main headings were formed. The subcategories under these headings and the reports published by the universities were evaluated by how many times they mentioned the frequency of mentioning. In the last part of the study, the studies and applications of the universities in the scope of the CSR activities were dealt with by qualitative research method. The universe of qualitative research consists of 29 universities. Koç University and Culture University in Istanbul, Yaşar University in Izmir and Ege University's reports in the selected universities are not accessible from the web pages. The four universities mentioned were excluded from the scope of the research because they could not receive a return even though they were requested by mail from the official authorities and they created the limitation of working. The sample of the study consists of 25 universities. Finally, it has been seen that universities are most similar to CSR applications in terms of social responsibility category. Ethics has been seen as the least common practice among universities.Literature surveys did not reveal the existence of a comprehensive study of the similarities of CSR practices of universities. In this respect, it is thought that the study of thesis is a unique work which can contribute to the literature