engleski

Text Analysis of Social Responsibility Topics in Master Theses

There has been a surge of emphasizing the importance of business ethics, sustainability, environmental care, and other similar topics commonly referred to as social responsibility. By incorporating such practice in business, stakeholder aim to increase environmental protection, social and economic development. Faculties, which are shaping the future leaders, are one of the most important stakeholders with a high responsibility for embedding social responsibility in the students’ behaviour. Social responsibility is often used in defining both the faculty’s mission and vision. To empirically test whether the importance of social responsibility is acquired by students, an exploratory text mining study was conducted. In case faculties are successful in emphasizing socially responsible consequences, we might expect the increase in the number of master theses aiming at examining such issues. More than 4000 master theses abstracts, from two major Croatian business faculties, spanning form 2015 to present, were analysed. There were two primary outcome measures. First, the number of theses which included social responsibility terms in their abstract section, and second, the specific words’ frequencies. Results revealed that around 1/3 of master theses contains words such as climate, sustainability, corona, etc. When analysing by study program, the highest percentage of papers with such topics is found in Finance and Trade and Tourism programs, while Accounting and Business Informatics theses do not often include such topics. Additionally, frequency of such social responsibility terms was analysed across years. Although there was a small incline in the amount of theses addressing these topics in the recent years, the pattern is rather stable across years. Since the study is exploratory, additional analyses were conducted such as the occurrence of specific words for each study program, the popularity of topics by year, and others that were not primary aims of the present study. These findings can aid faculties in creating, or updating their faculty policies, but can also be used by researchers wishing to extend the present research by comparing trends observed in Croatia with theses made in EU and other countries or including other faculties beside business ones. Study limitations, such as the small time span, and the sampling from two faculties will be addressed with future studies.

learning, master thesis, sustainability, ecology, students

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