Drawing on library and information science, strategy, and organizational theory, this article presents a theoretical approach to the determination of corporate library contribution to its parent firm. This approach departs from previous work on this topic, which focused on corporate library contribution to corporate operations and standing, savings in corporate time and cost, generating benefit in excess of cost, generating value for individual corporate library users, or indicators of corporate library operation, such as its outputs. Instead, this direction focuses on interactions among phenomena located within the corporate library, ones located outside of the corporate library but within the corporate library's parent firm, and ones located outside of the parent firm. The accompanying article, Part II (available as an electronic-only article in this issue), reviews the strengths and weaknesses of several methodologies capable of carrying out this approach to determining a corporate library's contribution to its parent firm.