Rethinking the Bottom of the Pyramid:

A Critical Perspective from an Emerging Economy

Autoria: Alexandre de Almeida Faria, Marcus Wilcox Hemais

ABSTRACT
Based on a decolonial perspective enunciated in an emerging economy, this article highlights
the dark side of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach, which has been overseen in
mainstream Western management literature, especially in marketing. More than a marketoriented strategy, the BoP approach is discussed as a (geo)political design of Eurocentric
modernity, reinforcing a neocolonial order, under the rhetoric of salvation. By reinforcing
market-orientation logic as the way for the poor others to develop, BoP fosters a US-led
neoliberal order in non-Western countries, challenging the decolonial option for a world
where many worlds and knowleges could coexist.

1. INTRODUCTION
The pro-poor rhetoric has historically been associated with Eurocentric pro-modernity
claims and designs aimed to foster a better world for all from the particular perspective of the
wealthy, powerful and civilized. During the Cold War, it was mobilized by First World
countries, led by the United States (US), to promote the development of Third World
countries.
More recently, in tandem with the transformation of globalization into global
imperialism (STEGER, 2009), this rhetoric was directed towards developing countries and
emerging economies to promote neoliberal globalization. Its underlying idea is that the nonWest is naturally entrapped with backwardness and in chronic need of salvation and that the
developed West should be responsible for saving the poor through the creation of markets
and freedom.
Because of this Eurocentric legacy, the pro-poor rhetoric literature in management tends
to be silent about the totality of the system, since it envisages the system from a particular
perspective that is grounded on the imposition of the rhetoric of salvation through modernity i.e., an advance from a primitive state. More specifically, it reinforces the visibility of the
successful rhetoric of modernity and keeps invisible the exploitative and inhuman logic of
coloniality, which is essential to insure the success - that is, growing progress and
increasing poverty (MIGNOLO, 2005, p.120). Coloniality is understood here as the dark
side of modernity, and refers to the domination of power imposed by the West on the nonWest (QUIJANO, 2007).
Recently, and particularly after the events of 9/11 and subsequent rise of U.S.
unilateralism, and at the expense of those who point out the rise of neocolonialism fostered by
Western corporations in the neoliberal era, one of the main designs to help solve the poverty
problem discussed in management literature, especially in the marketing area, has been the
Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach. This approach has been developed mainly by C.K.
Prahalad (PRAHALAD, 2006; PRAHALAD; HART, 2002; PRAHALAD; HAMMOND,
2002) and pushed and supported by powerful US-led institutions in particular United
Nations and World Bank (HULME, 2010; COLLINS; RHOADS, 2010).
Mainstream literature on the BoP approach discusses it mainly as a market oriented
approach to help end poverty. Nevertheless, the BoP approach has also been described by a
few as a design that fosters (geo)political and inter-state issues that reinforce neocolonial
order (ARORA; ROMIJN, 2011). This dark side of the BoP approach is commonly overseen
by academics, especially in marketing, which can be explained by the involvement the area of
marketing has had, since the end of the Cold War and the expansion of neoliberal
globalization, with a market orientation (MO) logic (HUBBARD; NORMAN; MILLER,
2005), as a way to disseminate a US-led neoliberal order in non-Western countries
especially in emerging economies. The main objective of this paper is, therefore, to develop a
more comprehensive understanding of the BoP approach, by highlighting its neocolonial side,
from the perspective of an emerging economy.
The second section of this paper discusses the concepts of Modernity, Coloniality and
Decoloniality, and their relation with the BoP approachs rhetoric of salvation. The third
section presents the main reasoning behind the BoP approach. The fourth section discusses
the dark side of the market orientation concept. The fifth section presents the (geo)political
and inter-state issues related to BoP approach. The last section provides suggestions for
further critical developments on the BoP approach from a decolonial perspective enunciated
in an emerging economy from Latin America.

2. MODERNITY/ COLONIALITY/ DECOLONIALITY AND THE RHETORIC OF

SALVATION
Related to the BoP rhetoric is the ideology that the poor need help and the only way to
do this is through the implementation of US-based market-oriented discourses, since all other
forms of salvation, such as governmental and non-government organizational aid, have failed.
This assumption is based on the premise that the poor are individuals living in non-Western
countries, plagued with eternal backwardness and poverty, whose salvation is a
responsibility of the developed West (ARORA; ROMIJN, 2012).
This line of thought can be traced back to Eurocentric modernity a totalitarian and
imperial episteme that invented and established the categories that distinguish racially and
hierarchically people and regions (MIGNOLO, 2009), neglecting geographical, social and
historical diversity of individuals in countries and regions outside of the Eurocentric core
(BROHMAN, 1995). Through this view of modernity, Western-based ideologies are believed
to be universal and used as moral obligation of modern civilizations to relieve the most
barbaric, primitive, coarse people from a state of eternal immaturity (DUSSEL, 2000,
p.472).
This imperialistic Eurocentric episteme is intimately related to the mobilization of the
concept of poverty (DUSSEL, 1993). The latter permits the first to advance, since the West
must save the non-Western poor, even if this means resorting to violence as a necessary way
to overcome or suppress the barbaric character of such immature other. From the perspective
of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality put forward in Latin America (ESCOBAR, 2010), the
construction and cultivation of the concept of poverty through processes of conquest,
extraction and accumulation has been a crucial feature in the materialization of Eurocentric
domination and corresponding world order, and in the subsequent mobilization of pro-poor
discourses (QUIJANO, 2007).
The Eurocentric vision neglects that modernity has a darker side, a colonial side, which
carries negative content, where modernity is the justification of an irrational praxis of
violence (DUSSEL, 2000: 472). The salvation of the other, from a Western perspective, is
anything but salvation, in the view of non-Westerners, since, in the process of modernity, they
lose the richness and diversity of their societies (BROHMAN, 1995, p. 122).
Eurocentric modernity requires and reinforces epistemic coloniality (IBARRACOLADO, 2006). Epistemic coloniality is one of the effects and conditions of the dominant
framework of geopolitics of knowledge in the management literature, particularly in
marketing, imposed by the defenders of universal Eurocentrism. This invisible face of
coloniality is marked by the imposition of one type of knowledge based on one other
reality, which overshadows local practices and knowledge, thus guaranteeing their
subalternization (IBARRA-COLADO, 2006).
Coloniality is, thus, described as the dark side of Eurocentric modernity (MIGNOLO,
2011). In fact, modernity and coloniality are inseparable parts of the same phenomena, and
emerge simultaneously in the sixteenth century with the discovery of America by
Christopher Columbus, in 1492 (see BANERJEE; CHIO; MIR, 2009), and not only in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century (as if it were a phenomena derived from modernity), such
as proposed by the Eurocentric version of Eurocentric modernity (DUSSEL, 1993).
Coloniality is a concept created to designate the domination of power, of being, and of
knowledge. It differs from colonialism since it does not refer to a determined period of time,
established arbitrarily by analysts. Coloniality is a strategy of domination that is based on the
distinction of races between those who conquer from those that are conquered and in the
corresponding geopolitics of knowledge production. Even after the end of the European
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colonial domination over Asia and Africa, for example, the coloniality of power as a principle
and strategy of domination and control has continued (QUIJANO, 2007).
In response to (and against) the global spread of a one-dimensional way of seeing the
world, developed by modernity, coloniality and the totalitarian Eurocentric episteme, Mignolo
(2011) defends that it is necessary for the barbarians to delink and promote the
epistemology from the exteriority. This decolonial option must be proposed by the rest of the
world under a transmodern pluriversality perspective (DUSSEL, 1993), by way of
involvement with borderline theorizations and thoughts that were in large part ignored or
subalternized by the totalitarian epistemology (also in Europe and elsewhere).
As there is no external part to modernity at this stage, border thinking can be described
as the epistemology of the exteriority, that is, from the exterior that was created by the interior
(MIGNOLO; TLOSTANOVA, 2006). Border thinking originates from the colonial
difference, the locus in which modernity and coloniality are found (MIGNOLO, 2011), and in
essence challenges the Eurocentric idea that thinking is de-localized, when, in fact, thinking
is inevitably located. Border thinking should be interpreted as a response to the violence of
imperial/territorial epistemology and the rhetoric of Eurocentric modernity/globalization of
salvation. The transmodern pluriversality inherent in border thinking transcends Eurocentric
modernity by not proposing the substitution of one type of modernity for another; it defends
the co-construction of a world in which diverse worlds and knowledges could coexist.
By engaging the decolonial perspective to analyze and reframe the BoP approach, we
argue that it is possible to go beyond the pro-poor rhetoric that proposes solving the poverty
problem by way of an Eurocentric neoliberal market order in a global scale. By engaging a
decolonial perspective intended not to foster a clash of civilizations (HUNTINGTON,
1989), but to foster transmodern pluriversality, the BoP approach is seen as a rhetoric
permeated with (geo)political issues, which aims to reinforce the neocolonial order and
contain alternatives in general and the decolonial option in particular. In a nutshell, offering
adequate products and services to the poor, raising their quality of life and, in consequence,
eradicating poverty is, thus, not exactly the main objective of the BoP approach.
3. THE BOP RHETORIC
The proponents of BoP claim that the bottom part of the global economic pyramid is
constituted with billions of poor consumers (i.e., below 2-dollar a day), which represents, as a
whole, a fortune for corporations willing to adapt product and services to serve them.
According to two main proponents of the BoP approach: The real source of market promise
is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or even the emerging middle-income
consumers: It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the market for the first time.
(PRAHALAD; HART, 2002, p. 1).
Rather than imposing home-based marketing strategies in developing countries, those
corporations from the West should serve the poor in the non-West from a truly global marketoriented perspective. Embarking the rebirth of international development as poverty
eradication, BoP strategies and programs should promote the development of poor markets
into emerging or developed markets on a global scale (FAULCONBRIDGE, 2013; WOOD;
PITTA; FRANZAK, 2008).
Prahalad and powerful institutions believe that by offering adequate products and
services to the four billion poor individuals located outside the West, they can be saved from
poverty by raising their quality of life, which, in consequence, would eradicate global poverty.
By engaging the rhetoric of salvation, corporations should become responsible for this global
problem, instead of governments, at the expense of critical authors who argue that they have
become more imperialist in the [contemporaneous] era of neoliberal accumulation
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(BANERJEE; CHIO; MIR, 2009, p.4) and that imperialist adventures from the basis of many
actions that are now accepted MNC practices (BANERJEE; CHIO; MIR, 2009, p.7).
Prahalad undermines such criticism since, in his view, corporate imperialism ended with
the arrival of the era of neoliberal globalization (PRAHALAD; LIBERTHAL, 1998).
Corporations are expected not to exploit the rest of the world, but to foster salvation wherever
they find in the non-West poverty and chronic deficit of modern market-oriented institutions
(also called institutional voids). Such reading goes against a vast literature that claims
exactly the opposite: the rhetoric of modernity works through the imposition of salvation,
whether as Christianity, civilization, modernization and development after WWII or market
democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union (MIGNOLO, 2007, p. 463).
The proponents of the BoP also target (geo)political and inter-state issues regarding
civil and cross-border conflicts and global terrorism (PRAHALAD; HAMMOND, 2002).
This dark side of the BoP approach has been overlooked by academics especially in
marketing and market-oriented institutions (mainly in the West), and reinforces the
neocolonial side of the BoP approach, which helps explain why the BoP approach has
achieved such global success. It is in tune not only with the economic and market-oriented
side of coloniality, but in particular with its political and inter-state-oriented side. Its
trajectory of success goes in tandem with the rise of US unilateralism and the launch of the
global war on terror, after the events of 9/11, by George W. Bush (Bush, 2002a).
The BoPs strategic concern with the spread of global terrorism was expanded in
parallel to growing concerns in the US with the rise of emerging economies (PIETERSE,
2009). As US-led neoliberal globalization unfolded through a sequence of crises, discussions
across the North Atlantic framed emerging economies especially China as potential major
threats to the US-led West, restraining the expansion of large corporations and neoliberal
capitalism (BOYER; TRUMAN, 2005).
BoP strategies became helpful to foster the promotion of market-oriented institutions in
emerging economies, not only due to market-oriented reasons, but especially due to
geopolitical and inter-state ones. No wonder it has been claimed that the marginalization of
Muslims by the mainstream marketing literature is dangerous because misperceptions can
certainly lead to a risk of polarization and global divides (EL-BASSIOUNY, 2014, p. 42).
The proponents of the BoP approach claim that the transition to market economies is the
only alternative for global economic growth, even if such process is fraught with
uncertainties. Discussions tend to exclude any other alternative, since the adoption of such
types of markets is no longer in question (PRAHALAD; LIBERTHAL, 1998, p.127).
Institutions in emerging economies should, in effect, be transformed into market-oriented
ones. When it happens, marketing and strategic management concepts developed in the US
and Europe will function properly in less developed contexts (LONDON; HART, 2004). The
proponents of the BoP approach claims that the problem lies with the anomalies of
underdeveloped societies, rather than on the imposition of colonizing theories.
The diffusion and institutionalization of the BoP approach on a global scale, as a way to
foster a non-imperialistic market-oriented perspective, helped overshadow argument that USled neoliberal globalization has not brought the promises of better markets for all, which
would in turn help eliminate poverty (ARAUJO, 2013; STIGLITZ, 2003). It has also helped
to keep invisible discussions around the rise of US neo-imperialism (HARVEY, 2003) and the
dark or colonial side of US-led neoliberal capitalism (KOTZ, 2009).
This dark or colonial side of the BoP approach, which is more salient in the rest of the
world than in the West, challenges the underpinnings of the concept of market orientation and
the strong engagement of US-led marketing discipline with MO in the early 1990s. More
specifically, this dark and untold side of the BoP approach challenges the reworkings of MO
in emerging economies (VISWANATHAN; SETH; GAU; CHATURVEDI, 2009;
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VISWANATHAN; SRINIVAS; ROBIN, 2010; WEBB; IRELAND; HITT; KISTRUCK;

TIHANYI, 2011).
The marketing literature has overlooked such discussions, based on the principle that
the neoliberal market-oriented world order is one civilization, with no divides of North and
South. This US-led neoliberal view gained further currency with the end of the Cold War,
when it was understood that US-led capitalism prevailed over communism, and free
markets were the only way to foster economic growth and opportunities for all. Such view
was exported globally, especially to Latina America (ALCADIPANI; BERTERO, 2011;
VIEIRA, 2003), contributing to exclude important political and ideological debates, as part of
a colonial process (ALCADIPANI; CALDAS, 2012).
This discourse disguises the fact that US-led neoliberal globalization actually represents
the expansion and deepening of asymmetrical processes informed by the Eurocentric
representation of the rest of the world as locales marked by chronic backwardness and threat.
It constrains the capacity of the rest of the world to foster other knowledges in marketing and
alternatives to US-led neo-imperial order (SANTOS, 2001; SOUSA SANTOS, 2007;
TADAJEWSKI, 2010), since the area of marketing is seen more as part of the problem than
of its solution (BREI; ROSSI; EVRARD, 2007).
In this vein, we argue that marketing should recognize that, more than just a marketoriented corporate strategy informed by the Eurocentric idea of salvation, the BoP approach
serves as a mechanism of colonization of what managerialism would have us believe are
institutional voids (COOKE; FARIA, 2013).
4. ON THE DARK SIDE OF MARKET-ORIENTED ACCOUNTS
Marketing discipline and institutions embraced the BoP as a way of fostering a truly
global market orientation. Market-oriented strategies focused on middle class in advanced
economies and applied in emerging economies, informed by an obsolete logic of corporate
imperialism, had to be replaced by grand market-oriented strategies, aimed to include the ones
located at the margins of the market. The BoP approach embraced the salvation rhetoric,
focusing on helping local people and marketing academics overcome the institutional voids of
emerging economies and foster right conditions for the rise of modern markets and marketoriented institutions.
The sudden end of the Cold War period in the late 1980s marked the final victory of the
US-led neoliberal war of ideas based on free market and stateless world. No wonder it was in
1990 that the concept of market orientation was launched (NARVER; SLATER, 1990;
KOHLI; JAWORSKI, 1990) and started an unprecedented trajectory of success in the field of
marketing (HUBBARD; NORMAN; MILLER, 2005).
There is, on the other hand, a dark side of MO, in the same fashion there is a dark side
of BoP and Eurocentric modernity (MIGNOLO, 2011). This other side is generally ignored
by the marketing literature produced within the core of the system. Even analysis from the
perspective of academics and market-oriented institutions in emerging economies tend to
constrain in marketing any perspective from the invaded outside that was fabricated by the
inside invader" (IBARRA-COLOADO, 2006, p.464).
The US-led neoliberal ideas that inform the concept of MO begin in the 1970s, with the
launch of the neoliberal war of ideas aimed to restore the hegemony of the US (HARVEY,
2003). This war of ideas started when non-Western countries initiated reforms especially in
China that would push the rise of the rest of the world (ARRIGHI, 2007).
The neoliberal war of ideas was led by US power elites and US-led powerful
institutions in particular World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United
Nations (UN). It was consolidated when the IMF replaced its Keynesian economists with
6

neoliberal monetarists, making the Fund a prime agent of neoliberalization (HARVEY,

2007, p.32). This idea of a stateless world, featured by peace, progressive change, freedom,
cooperation and multipolarity, was based on an assumption that countries in general, and the
lone superpower in particular, would be voluntarily willing to dispense state sovereignty
over markets.
This neoliberal and rather illusionary representation of market, which was diffused on a
global scale by powerful US-led institutions and at the expense of alternatives and major
interests of the rest of the word, was backed by influential authors and institutions in
marketing in the US (especially the Marketing Science Institute). They defended that
everything that was not part of the market should become part of the market (ACHROL;
KOTLER, 2000), creating an ideal scenario for the proliferation of the concept of MO.
The first articles on MO showed how large businesses (in the US) that followed this
concept achieved superior performance (NARVER; SLATER, 1990; KOHLI; JAWORSKI,
1990). Based on such (biased) results, research on MO expanded beyond its initial scope in
the private sector, invading (KOTLER, 2005) the realm of public organizations and nonprofit organizations. This expansion was also noticed globally, as researchers from different
countries applied uncritically the concept in Asia, Latina America and Eastern Europe
(HOOLEY et al., 2000, 2003), proving that MO could be implemented in many contexts.
The literature on MO overlooks the fact that the success of this concept was based not
only on its seductive flavor, but mainly on the unrivalled military power of the US, especially
after the US victory of the Cold War, interpreted as the apex of Eurocentric modernity and the
arrival of an unconstrained market civilization (LIE, 1997). With the end of the Cold War, the
US started to experience its unipolar moment. To restore its hegemony, the US began
diffusing global scale neoliberal discourses. Market-oriented disciplines and concepts, such as
marketing and MO, were particularly helpful for this grand strategy (KAGAN, 2002).
The first more obvious signs of failure of market fundamentalism i.e., the notion that
unfettered markets by themselves can ensure economic prosperity and growth" for all
(STIGLITZ, 2009, p. xiii) with the Asian crisis in 1997 had raised counter-movements. The
age of freedom, inaugurated by US-led neoliberal hegemony, turned into an age of exclusion,
becoming "clear that the free market is incapable of welcoming everyone. The business of
the market is not to provide jobs, let alone social cohesion. There is no room for the growing
number of people who make little or no contribution to production and consumption. The
market operates for the benefit of the minority" (GEORGE, 1997, p.47).
The age of US-led neoliberal hegemony was criticized by many, especially by the antiglobalization movement. The critiques had the IMF and the World Bank as the main targets,
because their promises of modernity through neoliberal order did not result in positive
outcomes. Dissemination of poverty in the global South was one of the consequences of this
new world market-based order.
The marketing literature overlooked this overall picture, in tandem with the first
obvious signs of success achieved by MO (KOHLI; JAWORSKI, 1990). There was another
reason for the marketing literature to overlook this picture. Counter-movements and academic
arguments contrary to the US-led neoliberal project were framed as signs of subversion and
divergence by US-led neoliberal elites, who had in their hands not only the control of finance
neoliberalism but the unrivalled military power of the lone superpower. More specifically,
anti-globalization manifestations were framed as manifestations of anti-Americanism and
anti-modernity. Any plural visions in marketing, which supported "border thinking", were
classified as inadequate by the dominant episteme (FIRAT, 2010), showing how difficult it is
for the area to admit its errors of the past (CASOTTI, 1998).
This dark side of US-led neoliberal hegemony was reinforced with the election of
George W. Bush as president in 2000, as it brought the neoconservatives back to power
7

(HARVEY, 2003), and the events of 9/11 in 2001. That was a strong justification for military
interventions and an important trigger for the reinforcement of MO and the launch of the BoP
approach globally.
Motivated by such events, debates on US empire got to the surface, not only abroad, but
mainly in the US. Consensus was that the anti-imperialist restrain that was holding back the
US in becoming the next great global empire should be eliminated, as the disorder in poor
countries grows more threatening (MALLABY, 2002, p.2). The US was portrayed as a
benign or benevolent hegemony and as the indispensable nation (IKENBERRY, 2004) to
bring modernity to the non-Western world.
With the transformation of neoliberal globalism into military globalism after the events
of 9/11 (see STEGER, 2009) executives from global corporations, analysts form large
consultancy firms, and researchers from business schools and think tanks admitted in the US
that the market in emerging economies had specific institutional characteristics, different from
(and inferior to) advanced economies, that should be acknowledged by researchers, executives
and consultants from advanced or developed economies.
While specialized literature in management, and especially in marketing, focused on
such institutional characteristics of markets in emerging economies, it overlooked
international and geo-political issues and, in particular, the claims in the US that the rise of
emerging economies was threatening to the West, because such world order would be marked
by the rise of authoritarianism (BOYER; TRUMAN, 2005). Russias soft power strategies
toward Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia (HILL, 2006), and Chinas soft power
programs in Africa and Latin America became major issues within Euro-American
international relations circles and help explain why emerging economies have been portrayed
as a threat to the West.
The MO literature overlooks authors who argue that large corporations and marketoriented strategies and philosophies explain a great deal of the problems faced by emerging
economies (BLOCK; EVANS, 2005; MADELEY, 2008). More important, it also ignores the
rise of a US-led neo-imperial market-oriented world order, under the allegation of modernity.
Where as in the sixteenth century modernity had begun with Christianity, had been followed
by the civilizing mission in the nineteenth and developmentalism in the twentieth, in the
present century modernity is associated with the vision of a neoliberal global market
(MIGNOLO, 2000).
As we supposedly get into the second round of globalization, both critical and
mainstream analysts from developed economies seem to agree that emerging economies will
play a key role in the future of global capitalism and that it is necessary to engage the other
as long as they do not address the complicated self (unintentionally). According to Kemal
Dervis (2005), the head of the United Nations Development Programme, globalization, which
was viewed by some as an unequalizing process in the twentieth century, has the potential to
become an equalizing process in the twenty-first century.
5. THE BOP APPROACH AS A REWORKING OF A NEO-IMPERIAL MARKETORIENTED ORDER
In the preface of his bestselling book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid:
eradicating poverty through profits, Prahalad (2006, p.xv) discusses the difficulties in
publishing his first article with Stuart Hart, about the relationship between multinational
corporations and poverty alleviation. According to the author, not a single journal would
accept the article for publication. It was too radical. . Reviewers thought that it did not follow
the work of developmental economists.
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After such rejections, Prahalad adapted his ideas on the BoP approach in his working
paper (PRAHALAD; HART, 2000). His newer articles were better accepted. Curiously, in
2002, they finally got published; one of them, with Allen Hammond, in the prestigious
Harvard Business Review (HBR) (PRAHALAD; HAMMOND, 2002).
From a decolonial perspective, the acceptance of Prahalads work in HBR should not be
seen as a surprise. Historically, the journal has taken a stance in defending US interests,
which, very often, meant spurring neoliberal order. During the Cold War, for instance,
academics - in particular one of the Deans of Harvard Business School - and executives that
voiced their opinions in HBR urged for the expansion of businesses social responsibility as
a means of defending free market capitalism against the global expansion of communism
(SPECTOR, 2006, 2008). Since Prahalads BoP proposition defended a similar corporate
responsibility, advancing a US-based market oriented approach promising it would eradicate
poverty, it was only natural that the article would be well accepted in HBR.
Prahalads published articles presented small changes to the ideas proposed initially in
his working paper, though the salvation rhetoric was maintained. His new approach became
more aligned with the context of the times. In these articles, Prahalad linked poverty to
terrorism, defending that the BoP approach could eradicate the first and, in effect, eliminate
the latter (PRAHALAD; HAMMOND, 2002; PRAHALAD; HART, 2002). In doing this,
Prahalads work gained recognition in the academic community, especially in the field of
management, at a time when the US was prone for such propositions.
After the events of 9/11 in 2001, the US government declared war on terror, as a
prevention policy against the advance of terrorism and possible future attacks on the country.
This triggered a stream of declarations from US politicians about terrorism, and how its root
causes were related to poverty (ABADIE, 2006). To eliminate terrorism, therefore, the social
and political roots of poverty needed to be confronted (EHRLICH; LIU, 2002).
To complement the military approach, the US government started to defend that the
only way to deal with terrorism and poverty would be by offering economic freedom to
nations where such liberalism (to populations and businesses) was not present (PIAZZA,
2008). In this sense, the US saw itself as responsible in leading the fight for freedom from
terror (BUSH, 2002a), and bringing modernity to the non-Western world.
The belief that free markets were the answer to such critical global problems based itself
on the ideal that these forms of markets have proven their ability to lift whole societies out of
poverty (BUSH, 2002b, p.4). By implementing neoliberal order around the globe, trade
would increase between countries, creating economic prosperity. This, in exchange, would
help fight poverty and terrorism and the reemergence of reactionary forces from Islamic
radicalism that have weakened [the (neo)liberal order] and threatens to weak it further
(KAGAN, 2008: 105).
The view that the US was the lone superpower responsible for saving the world from
terrorism and implementing free markets in less developed contexts did not begin only in
response to the events of 9/11. In fact, in the post Asian Crisis, former US Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright declared that the US would not be intimidated or pushed off the world
stage by people who do not like what we stand for, and that is, freedom, democracy and the
fight against disease, poverty and terrorism (WHITNEY, 1998).
Such statement, given at a time when the US-led neoliberal project was being criticized
for its economic flaw in Asia, connect capitalist ideals to the fight against poverty and
terrorism, legitimizing the neoliberal order as the only alternative to resolve such problems.
Any organization or country against such reasoning would, by consequence, be considered an
opposer to the benefits of free markets and an enemy of the US. In this sense, when the events
of 9/11 occurred, it only helped to reinforce in the Eurocentric world that a US-led global
neoliberal order was needed.
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To incentivize support for the US-led global war on terror, foreign direct investment
from Western countries flowed into countries from the rest of the world that joined the efforts
to fight terrorism. Such investments also had a second purpose of disseminating a US shaped
market order in regions where other forms of markets were present. Only in the Arab World,
the US committed more than $1 billion to the United States-Middle East Partnership
Initiative, a loosely defined aid program designed to unleash the private sector, empower
civil society and foster democracy in the Near East and North Africa (MOORE; SCHRANK,
2003, p.112). Foreign investments from Western countries also helped the economy in
Pakistan have a 6 per cent average real GDP growth, after the country agreed to fight with the
US-led coalition against terrorism (FATIMA; SHAHBAZ; ISLAM, 2012). As well as raising
support in favor of the US assault against terror, such incentives also had the workings of
neocolonial order, since they helped foment neoliberal markets in regions where such type of
market was not common.
In this sense, the BoP approach fit well into the context of the times, since it promised
economic freedom, by way of MO (KARNANI, 2011), in regions where other forms of
market were practices. But, most importantly, the creation of a rhetoric of salvation that
combined poverty, terrorism and free markets permitted the neoliberal order to continue
advancing by way of the BoP, under allegations that this was the path to world order - an
order that, in essence, would follow US orders.
Though the BoP approach promised to eliminate terrorism through the eradication of
poverty, BoP Learning Labs did not expand to countries typically associated with terrorists, in
the Middle East or Africa. As a fact, these Labs where created in developed countries and,
especially, in emerging economies, not known for hosting terrorist activities. But, since these
economies do have large segments of poor individuals, they offered a perfect setting for the
BoP approach to flourish in the local field of management (GARDETTI, 2007).
The expansion of the BoP approach to developed countries and, especially, emerging
economies disguised the fact that the US-led neoliberal order has not saved the world, i.e.,
resulted in better markets and less world poverty. In fact, it has not been effective at
revitalizing global capital accumulation. But, in turn, it has succeeded in maintain power in
the West, through the dismantling of institutions in the rest of the world that defend a more
egalitarian socio-economic conduct (HARVEY, 2007). Also, the BoP approach has masked
that, behind its expansion, are the workings of the US to maintain a neocolonial order in
emerging economies, in face of the growing global importance these regions have achieved in
the recent past.
Important for the expansion of the BoP approach are the efforts of international
institutions, such as the WB, the IMF and the World Trade Organization, that promised that
the US-led neoliberal order would help end poverty, bringing stability and growth to
underdeveloped countries and emerging economies. But, contrary to these allegations, poverty
has not receded, and blame has been pointed at the WB and the IMF, since in almost all recent
cases of countries economic collapses, these institutions have been heavily involved,
attempting to implement a US-led neoliberal market order (EASTERLY, 2007).
In consequence of the failures of such institutions in trying to eliminate poverty through
neoliberal ideals, criticism has been made to the way the proponents of the BoP approach
argue in favor of MO. BoP reconceptualize poverty as a problem that can only be solved by
market mechanisms, stripping all historical, political and social foundations associated with
this problem (SCHWITTAY, 2011). The poor, in result, are constituted as empowered
consumers, mirrored on their Western peers, individualizing their needs and arguing that only
through markets will they be able to enhance their personal benefits (BONSU; POLSA,
2011). As Prahalad puts it: If people have no sewerage and drinking water, should we also
deny them television and cell phones? (JOHNSON, 2005).
10

Through the implementation of the BoP approach in emerging economies, the

empowered poor consumer starts to rely more and more on markets to supply him with
gains, shifting citizenship to consumerism, reinforcing the notion that free markets are the
only alternative. But, in truth, these consumers have scarce power over markets (MADELEY,
2008).
Curiously, when the proponents of the BoP approach talk about poverty, they only refer
to the poor in emerging economies and underdeveloped countries, not acknowledging that in
Western countries this same problem, to a certain extent, is also present (ARORA; ROMIJN,
2012). They discuss cases of successful corporate actions in helping the poor from countries
in Latina America and Asia (HART, 2010; LONDON; HART, 2010; PRAHALAD, 2006),
disregarding examples coming from the US or Europe. They describe emerging economies
and underdeveloped countries mostly in terms of their disadvantages relative to developed
economies, legitimizing the exploitation of local markets, because of their disfunctionality,
corruption, inefficiency and injustice to the poor (MONTGOMERY; PEREDO; CARLSON,
2012).
This reworking of the neo-imperial market order through the BoP approach shows how
this concept appears to be a continuity in symbolic colonial tactics that reproduces the
inequalities of market power (BONSU; POLSA, 2011, p. 239). It is based on a neocolonial
and racist dichotomy between Western and non-Western values, where Western values
represent liberalism, rationality, social equality and individual rights, and non-Western values
represent illiberalism, irrationality, social inequality and collective rights. Under such
rationale, the imposition of MO through the BoP approach in a global scale is a legitimate
responsibility of the US, the lone superpower, since the promotion of democracy, human
rights, and markets are far more central to American policy than to the policy of any other
country (HUNTINGTON, 1993, p.83). For the BoP approach to foster modernity, therefore,
coloniality must come with it (MIGNOLO, 2011).
By reinforcing the market orientation logic as the only way for to the poor others to
develop, the BoP approach reinforces the US-led neoliberal order in non-Western countries,
especially in emerging economies group of countries portrayed as a major threat to the USled Western civilizing hegemony, because of their growing importance as world ordermakers. In this sense, the BoP approach perpetuates the rhetoric of salvation by framing
decoloniality as a threat, reinforcing the Eurocentric mandate that states that the coexistence
of worlds, orders and knowledges is an impossibility because of the inevitable clash of
civilizations (HUNTINGTON, 1989).
In other words, the neocolonial order engendered by the BOP design not just reinforces
five centuries of Eurocentric domination, but it also aims to contain the decolonial option and
the many claims from the bottom of the pyramid. It also helps to contain the many
alternatives provided by the rest of the world especially by the so-called emerging
economies (see ARRIGHI; ZHANG, 2011) for the (re)(co-)construction of a world in which
many worlds and knowleges could coexist from a perspective of transmodern pluriversality.
6. FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
This paper aims to foster a decolonial option to the bottom of the pyramid approach, by
highlighting its neocolonial side from a particular perspective enunciated in an emerging
economy from Latin America. Our understanding of decolonial thinking from Latina America
is informed by the realization that coloniality is the darker and constitutive side of modernity.
Accordingly, it is informed by the understanding that the rhetoric of modernity "is a rhetoric
of salvation (by conversion yesterday, by development today), but in order to implement what
the rhetoric preaches, it is necessary to marginalize or destroy whatever gets in the way of
11

modernity (MIGNOLO, 2011: xxiv-xxv). In this sense, we pointed out in this paper that the
BoP rhetoric also serves as a mechanism to contain the decolonial option. More specifically, it
aims to contain the co-construction of transmodern pluriversality and reinforce the
rewesternization strategy focused on guaranteeing by all means faithful believers in the USled neoliberal order.
By adopting a decolonial view, we tried to highlight a side of the BoP approach (i.e. the
dark side) that has been overlooked by mainstream management literature, especially in
marketing studies. More importantly, we intend to bring forth a decolonial perspective of the
BoP approach from academics that live and work in an emerging economy from Latin
America and engage with researchers who live and work outside of the bottom of the
pyramid. Our intention with this is to help co-construct other knowledges that dialogue with
existing knowleges from a perspective of transmodern pluriversality, instead of Eurocentric
universality.
Discussions on the BoP have been fostered by academics who are inside of the system
(therefore, outside of the BoP), and directed towards countries where the BoP approach has
been imposed, especially in emerging economies. Informed by the rhetoric of salvation
established by Eurocentric modernity, such developments tend to frame the BoP approach as
a universal market-oriented approach, at the expense of darker and constitutive side of
modernity that is a priority for those who work and live at the BoP.
The rhetoric of salvation that informs the BoP approach frames the non-Western world
as locales naturally marked by backwardness and threats that must be saved by civilizing or
true knowledge from the West. Such rhetoric keeps invisible the dark side of modernity to
justify BoP-alike neocolonial interventions, which are not framed as such because the darker
side of modernity has become more invisible to the Westerners than to non-Westeners over
the last five centuries of Eurocentric domination. The mobilization of the BoP approach as an
instrument of salvation for the chronically poor in the non-Western world can reinforce a
neocolonial order that goes at odds with the basic principles espoused by the BoP approach
itself.
Through a decolonial perspective, the BoP approach has been displayed in this paper as
more than just a market-oriented strategy of corporations aimed to get a fortune through the
salvation of the poor other. We showed it is also a geopolitical tool that expands a
controversial US-led Western neoliberal order towards the non-Western world, especially to
emerging economies, where other forms of order and ways of dealing with poverty, which
move much beyond the market-oriented rhetoric, have been responsible for the rise of the rest
(ARRIGHI, 2010). It is a neo-colonizing resource informed by modernity/coloniality that
constrains multipolarity by reinforcing the idea that there are no alternatives but the
neoliberal order driven by market and market-oriented business corporations.
The neocolonial and darker side of the BoP approach and MO is not only limiting, but is
criticized for its lack of adequacy to emerging economies. Authors from these regions
(VISWANATHAN; SRINIVAS; ROBIN, 2010) have stood against the imposition of a USled MO, questioning its sustainability, given the starkly different conditions
(VISWANATHAN et al., 2009, p. 421) existent in subsistence marketplaces.
Those different conditions helps explain why researchers outside of the bottom of
the pyramid tend to overlook the dark side of the BoP approach and MO. As academics from
an emerging economy located in Latin America, we join colleagues from emerging economies
in other regions and other countries from the rest of the world (including those located in US
and Europe) to stand for the co-construction of a decolonial perspective in marketing that
could review the BoP approach and re-theorize marketing in particular and re-design
management in general.
12

We stand for the engagement of management institutions and knowledge, particularly in

the field of marketing, with the bottom of pyramid, constituted by millions of people in
Brazil who have been excluded from responsibilities appropriated by local universities
through the mobilization of the Eurocentric rhetoric of salvation, to liberate the field. By
engaging the basic tenets of transmodern pluriversality, we also stand in this paper for the
engagement of management institutions and knowledge in different parts of the world with
such important mass of billions of excluded from the large global BoP as a necessary path
to the co-construction of a world in which many worlds and knowledges could coexist.
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