Corporate Social Responsibility as a Numerical Factor

Corporate Social Responsibility deals with the social and conscientious aspect of business. Organizations always have an orientation towards a profit motive. Though CSR has become a much talked about issue in most of the good organizations, still the factor of profit generation keeps this aspect at a secondary status. The responsibility is expected to be understood by the organizations and it is quite evident that stringent rules cannot be framed abruptly. What can be done instead is that, instead of regulation, a motivation can be created for the organization. In this respect, I would like to propose the idea of introducing a new factor, a numerical value that could measure the scale of CSR being fulfilled by any organization. The factor would be a measure of how far an organization is able to achieve the social issue while generating profit. The numerical value might just be a part of the balance sheet. The factor would include all the parameters of the social aspect and that in it would be a mammoth task. A fact to be observed here is that introduction of such a numerical value would actually be a good motivation for organizations if the factor is given a national or further an international stature, in a sense that it is recognized by the government. In that case, the social factor would be a good enough resource for the organizations to further analyze there policies, they might intend to use the factor for advertisement value as well. The factor may be extended to regulation later by introducing restrictions like a minimum value of the CSR numeric factor to be met by all organizations. The major issue however is how the factor can be so simplified a value that the entire concept of CSR can be inculcated into a single number. For this, we would have to study the various aspects of CSR including responsibility to consumers, shareholders, employees and the environment and nature. A measuring system will have to be formulated for each of the acts that can be performed outside the limitation of law for the interest of any of these aspects. The list of actions that the organization might perform, the methodology to calculate them and finally the weight given to a unit action will have to be decided which can then further be developed and added to give the final numerical index.