Decolonizing the Bottom of the Pyramid

Abstract

By engaging the decolonial option, this paper highlights the dark side of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach - which has been overseen in mainstream Western management literature and particularly in marketing studies - in order to foster the liberation of knowledge and being in/though management and organization studies through transmodern pluriversality. More than a market-oriented strategy for corporations to gain fortunes exploring untapped markets constituted by billions of poor consumers, the BoP approach is discussed in this paper as a post-Cold War (geo)political design of Eurocentric modernity, which reinforces the neoliberal/neocolonial order and mobilizes the rhetoric of salvation for rewesternizing the world. Such order bases itself on the assumption that Western-based ideologies are believed to be universal and used as moral obligation of modern civilizations to relieve the ‘poor others’ from an eternal state of immaturity and backwardness. By reinforcing the neoliberal market orientation logic as the only way for to the ‘poor others’ to develop, the BoP approach fosters the imposition of the US-led neoliberal order in non-Western countries, especially in emerging economies – seen by many as a threat to the US-led Western hegemony, because of their growing importance to the making of the world order. In this sense, the BoP approach perpetuates the rhetoric of salvation by both reinforcing the US-led rewesternization apparatus and containing the advance of decolonial option and the corresponding contribution for a world in which many worlds and knowleges could coexist.