A Need-Hierarchy Framework for Assessing Corporate Social Responsibility

We propose a microanalytic foundation for organizational analysis, using a paradigm taken from need theory. We present a taxonomic construct to assess corporate performance, and propose a yardstick to monitor its social responsibility. Though there exists an enormous literature of considerable intellectual substance critical of the traditional, or econologic, model of corporate social responsibility (CSR), little operationality inheres in the critique. The conceptualization of CSR, we feel, is more easily motivated and operationalized in the context of an organizational-need hierarchy.