How postgraduate students understand the corporate social responsibility concept - a comparative approach among Uruguay, Brazil and Portugal

The incorporation of Corporate Social Responsibility in companies depends on the way their managers understand this concept. Given that most of these managers are trained in postgraduate courses, the objective of this research is to realise how postgraduate students from Brazil, Portugal and Uruguay understand the Corporate Social Responsibility concept. An interview guide based on open questions, whose answers were analysed by qualitative and quantitative techniques, was applied to a convenience sample of students. The presence or absence of the main dimensions of the Corporate Social Responsibility concept proposed in the ISO 26000 Guide was identified in the responses. The results show that the analysed samples have a partial interpretation of the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility, in which an interpretive bias predominates, meaning that they associate this concept with the commitment to society and the involvement in environmental issues, instead of having an integral perspective idea, and do not consider Corporate Social Responsibility as the responsible management of the externalities and the incorporation of stakeholders' expectations in decisions, as established in the ISO 26000 guide. It is concluded that management postgraduate students of these countries do not have an adequate and sufficient knowledge of Corporate Social Responsibility.