C Dolan
Biographic Data
| ID | 39519 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Dolan |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Dolan |
| SIGNATURE | DOLAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | SOAS University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3939-6607 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 810 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
They’re going to have to start becoming”: What inclusive capitalism tells us about the changing face of development
In recent years, business has reimagined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a proactive market strategy, aligning itself with development orthodoxies of pro-poor and inclusive growth by enrolling the un- and underemployed into new regimes of entrepreneurial labour. Here, we examine this incarnation of “capitalism qua development”, through ethnographic case studies of market inclusion initiatives in Kenya – one spearheaded by a transnational…
Readiness, resilience and the ripple effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the promise of global inclusion
This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusio…
Aspiring Minds: A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial ed…
Mutuality Talk in a Family-Owned Multinational
This article draws on work carried out as part of a collaboration between an elite business school and a family-owned multinational corporation, concerned with promoting 'mutuality in business' as a new frontier of responsible capitalism. While the business school partners treated mutuality as a new principle central to an emergent ethical capitalism, the corporation claimed mutuality as a long-established value unique to their company. Both inte…
Logics of affordability and worth: Gendered consumption in rural Uganda
This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the "responsible" category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what …
Governance by campaign: The co-constitution of food issues, publics and expertise through new information and communication technologies
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newslet…
The ambiguity of mutuality: Discourse and power in corporate value regimes
Worker, businessman, entrepreneur: Kenya's shifting labouring subject
Entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as a salve for the political problem of jobless growth and shrinking state coffers. But, its contemporary position at the frontiers of African capitalism is premised on nearly a century of attention on the African ‘economic man’, figured and reconfigured through efforts of governments and international development institutions. This paper traces a genealogy of this labouring subject in Kenya, describing t…
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility ( CSR ) came into focus in the 1990s in response to mounting pressure from global‐, national‐, and local‐level institutions for corporations to be held accountable for moral failings—from financial scandals and environmental devastation to human rights abuses. It emerged as a platform to deliver sustainable development and address environmental and community development issues vis‐á‐vis commercial enterprise. CSR i…
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities - the practices, technologies, and representations of time - which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums:…
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible: Framing political engagement through the Buycott app
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
Business as a development agent: Evidence of Possibility and Improbability
An emphasis on making markets work for the poor has thrust companies into the role of 'development agents' - organisations that consciously seek to deliver outcomes that contribute to international development goals. This paper examines what business as a development agent means in terms of the promise, the conceptualisation and the developmental outcomes of several initiatives engaged in 'bottom billion capitalism'. It argues that, while these i…
Asr Forum: Engaging With African Informal Economies
Over the last decade, the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach has gained prominence as a tool of "inclusive" capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This approach reframes development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as "micro-entrepreneurs." Yet while transnational cap…
The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of priv…
Re-siting corporate responsibility
The bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) approach is championed as a way to deliver both corporate profits and poverty reduction. This article explores how "the poor" are repurposed as the instruments of ethical capitalism through the archetypal BOP model-Avon Cosmetics. A harbinger of "compassionate capitalism," Avon has long stylized its entrepreneurial opportunity as a channel to a transcendent realm of self-actualization and social transformation. The…
Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields
Arbitrating risk through moral values: The case of Kenyan fairtrade
This chapter examines the Kenyan Fairtrade flower as a site of value making, one that provides a constructive lens into how moral obligation and ethical accountability are shaped by risk perceptions and become visible through the process of transnational commodity exchange. Specifically, it argues that while Fairtrade labeling responds to the risks of corporate capitalism through consumption practices predicated on extending care and compassion t…
In the Mists of Development: Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields
Increasing numbers of consumers see themselves as ‘partners’ in poverty reduction, purchasing Fairtrade products to offset inequalities in the global economy and to ensure that producers in developing countries enjoy the same basic rights and freedoms as their Western counterparts. Yet the extent to which ethical consumption is restructuring commodity chains in a way that diminishes hierarchies between producers and consumers remains an open ques…
Stewards of Virtue? The Ethical Dilemma of CSR in African Agriculture
In recent years companies have responded to increasingly powerful consumer politics by expanding the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include ethical trade. This article examines the ethic embedded in and promulgated through ethical trade by use of a case study of African agriculture. Building on recent conceptualizations of globalization, neoliberalism and anthropological analyses of the audit economy, the authors put forward th…
Assembling flowers and cultivating homes: Labor and gender in Colombia
Assembling Flowers and Cultivating Homes: Labor and Gender in Colombia, by Greta Friedemann-Sanchez. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 192 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0979-3, ISBN-10: 0-7391-0979-0 (h
Market Affections: Moral Encounters with Kenyan Fairtrade Flowers
This paper explores commodity exchange as a morally inflected practice, one that mediates competing tensions of greed and generosity, the sacred and profane, and affection and estrangement through the fairtrade flower. Using the UK-Kenya fairtrade flower commodity chain to examine the cultural economy of fairtrade, I suggest that like the charity business and the international development industry, fairtrade complicates the distinction between th…
Fields of Obligation: Rooting ethical sourcing in Kenyan horticulture
It was not so long ago that mangoes, papaya and snow peas evoked images of tropical climes and exotic peoples. Recently, however, the consumption of so-called luxury fruits and vegetables has elicited a different sort of imagery. Far from the lure of seductive landscapes, today’s consumer is confronted with haunting images of toxic fields, child slavery and the African poor. Such images are part of a new morality of consumption, where consumers, …
Reaching the marginalised? Gender value chains and ethical trade in African horticulture
Ethical trade, through codes of practice, forms an important part of the value chains for horticultural products sourced from Africa by major European buyers. This paper explores the relationship between value chains in the horticultural sector, the employment patterns of African producers, and the process of code implementation from a gender perspective. It asks whether, in the context of the gendered economy, codes alone can improve working con…
Benevolent Intent? The Development Encounter in Kenya's Horticulture Industry
This article examines the trajectory of development policy and practice through the case of the Kenyan export trade of fresh produce. It traces how African labor, particularly women's labor, has been harnessed and restructured by three models of development: (1) the neoliberal prescriptions for agricultural diversification and contract farming; (2) the post-Washington consensus of pro-poor growth; and (3) the Corporate Social Responsibility movem…
Governance and Trade in Fresh Vegetables: The Impact of UK Supermarkets on the African Horticulture Industry
Production of fresh vegetables for export has grown rapidly in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade. This trade brings producers and exporters based in Africa together with importers and retailers in Europe. Large retailers in Europe play a decisive role in structuring the production and processing of fresh vegetables exported from Africa. The requirements they specify for cost, quality, delivery, product variety, inno…
A Gendered Value Chain Approach to Codes of Conduct in African Horticulture
Business as a development agent: Evidence of Possibility and Improbability
An emphasis on making markets work for the poor has thrust companies into the role of 'development agents' - organisations that consciously seek to deliver outcomes that contribute to international development goals. This paper examines what business as a development agent means in terms of the promise, the conceptualisation and the developmental outcomes of several initiatives engaged in 'bottom billion capitalism'. It argues that, while these i…
Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
On Farm and Packhouse: Employment at the Bottom of a Global Value Chain
The fresh vegetables commodity chain linking Kenyan producers with United Kingdom (UK) consumers employs significant numbers of workers in production and processing. This chain is dominated by UK retailers that determine the production imperatives of Kenyan firms upstream in the chain and, indirectly the employment strategies they adopt. This paper explores how competitive pressures are transmitted through the supply chain, and how exporters abso…
Changing Governance Patterns in the Trade in Fresh Vegetables between Africa and the United Kingdom
Over the past twenty years the marketing of African fresh vegetables in the United Kingdom has become dominated by large retailers that have adopted competitive strategies based on quality, year-round supply, and product differentiation. This has led to a dramatic change in marketing channels, from wholesale markets to tightly knit supply chains. Global value chain analysis is used to explain why the various stages of production and marketing hav…
Asr Forum: Engaging With African Informal Economies
Over the last decade, the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach has gained prominence as a tool of "inclusive" capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This approach reframes development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as "micro-entrepreneurs." Yet while transnational cap…
Market Affections: Moral Encounters with Kenyan Fairtrade Flowers
This paper explores commodity exchange as a morally inflected practice, one that mediates competing tensions of greed and generosity, the sacred and profane, and affection and estrangement through the fairtrade flower. Using the UK-Kenya fairtrade flower commodity chain to examine the cultural economy of fairtrade, I suggest that like the charity business and the international development industry, fairtrade complicates the distinction between th…
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities - the practices, technologies, and representations of time - which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums:…
Reaching the marginalised? Gender value chains and ethical trade in African horticulture
Ethical trade, through codes of practice, forms an important part of the value chains for horticultural products sourced from Africa by major European buyers. This paper explores the relationship between value chains in the horticultural sector, the employment patterns of African producers, and the process of code implementation from a gender perspective. It asks whether, in the context of the gendered economy, codes alone can improve working con…
Benevolent Intent? The Development Encounter in Kenya's Horticulture Industry
This article examines the trajectory of development policy and practice through the case of the Kenyan export trade of fresh produce. It traces how African labor, particularly women's labor, has been harnessed and restructured by three models of development: (1) the neoliberal prescriptions for agricultural diversification and contract farming; (2) the post-Washington consensus of pro-poor growth; and (3) the Corporate Social Responsibility movem…
The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of priv…
Stewards of Virtue? The Ethical Dilemma of CSR in African Agriculture
In recent years companies have responded to increasingly powerful consumer politics by expanding the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include ethical trade. This article examines the ethic embedded in and promulgated through ethical trade by use of a case study of African agriculture. Building on recent conceptualizations of globalization, neoliberalism and anthropological analyses of the audit economy, the authors put forward th…
Fields of Obligation: Rooting ethical sourcing in Kenyan horticulture
It was not so long ago that mangoes, papaya and snow peas evoked images of tropical climes and exotic peoples. Recently, however, the consumption of so-called luxury fruits and vegetables has elicited a different sort of imagery. Far from the lure of seductive landscapes, today’s consumer is confronted with haunting images of toxic fields, child slavery and the African poor. Such images are part of a new morality of consumption, where consumers, …
Re-siting corporate responsibility
The bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) approach is championed as a way to deliver both corporate profits and poverty reduction. This article explores how "the poor" are repurposed as the instruments of ethical capitalism through the archetypal BOP model-Avon Cosmetics. A harbinger of "compassionate capitalism," Avon has long stylized its entrepreneurial opportunity as a channel to a transcendent realm of self-actualization and social transformation. The…
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible: Framing political engagement through the Buycott app
Worker, businessman, entrepreneur: Kenya's shifting labouring subject
Entrepreneurship is increasingly promoted as a salve for the political problem of jobless growth and shrinking state coffers. But, its contemporary position at the frontiers of African capitalism is premised on nearly a century of attention on the African ‘economic man’, figured and reconfigured through efforts of governments and international development institutions. This paper traces a genealogy of this labouring subject in Kenya, describing t…
In the Mists of Development: Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields
Increasing numbers of consumers see themselves as ‘partners’ in poverty reduction, purchasing Fairtrade products to offset inequalities in the global economy and to ensure that producers in developing countries enjoy the same basic rights and freedoms as their Western counterparts. Yet the extent to which ethical consumption is restructuring commodity chains in a way that diminishes hierarchies between producers and consumers remains an open ques…
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition: The Case of Kenyan Horticulture
This article examines the social effects of contract farming of export horticulture among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. During the 1980s and 1990s, contracting was popularized by donors and governments alike as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunities for self-employment in rural areas. Considerable research has documented the tensions in social relations that emerge in such cases, giving rise to gendered struggles over land, la…
Logics of affordability and worth: Gendered consumption in rural Uganda
This article explores logics of affordability and worth within rural Ugandan households. Through an analysis of how worth is ascribed to certain goods, from the morally ambiguous personal consumption of alcohol and beauty products to the "responsible" category of educational spending and sanitary pads, the article demonstrates how gender norms and anxieties are marked and sustained in the consumption practices of the household, constituting what …
From What We Wear to What We Eat Upgrading in Global Value Chains
Summaries In recent academic debates, upgrading has emerged as a key way for developing countries to meet the competitive challenges of globalisation and trade liberalisation. This article draws on global commodity chains literature to comparatively explore the conditions within which upgrading occurs in two sectors: export horticulture in Kenya and textile/apparel in Tamil Nadu, India. In both sectors upgrading into new products, functions or ma…
Readiness, resilience and the ripple effect: Women-owned enterprise in Kenya and the promise of global inclusion
This article interrogates the promise of inclusive markets as the vehicle of gender empowerment empirically through a case study of a small women-owned enterprise in Nairobi on its journey to inclusion in one of the world’s largest corporate supply chains as part of their empowerment through enterprise initiative. Chronicling the efforts of women entrepreneurs to meet the stringent imperatives of a global retailer and be made ‘ready’ for inclusio…
Aspiring Minds: A Generation of Entrepreneurs in the Making
This article examines how corporate, state and donor interests have converged in attempts to craft South Africa's youngsters into an army of entrepreneurs as the last frontier for creating growth in a post-job world. We investigate the apparatus designed to engineer this entrepreneurial revolution and the actors hoping to seed enterprising aspirations in school-age kids. Our ethnographic findings show that while the ideology of entrepreneurial ed…
Assembling flowers and cultivating homes: Labor and gender in Colombia
Assembling Flowers and Cultivating Homes: Labor and Gender in Colombia, by Greta Friedemann-Sanchez. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 192 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0979-3, ISBN-10: 0-7391-0979-0 (h
Conflict and compliance: Christianity and the occult in horticultural exporting
The introduction of new export crops in the early 1990s upset the customary division of labour between men and women in Meru District, Kenya, and led to conflict over land, labour, and income. Women's workload increased; their earnings did not. They responded by turning to 'born-again' Christianity for support, and by resorting to traditional witchcraft to regain control
Governance and Trade in Fresh Vegetables: The Impact of UK Supermarkets on the African Horticulture Industry
Production of fresh vegetables for export has grown rapidly in a number of countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the last decade. This trade brings producers and exporters based in Africa together with importers and retailers in Europe. Large retailers in Europe play a decisive role in structuring the production and processing of fresh vegetables exported from Africa. The requirements they specify for cost, quality, delivery, product variety, inno…
The 'Good Wife': Struggles over Resources in the Kenyan Horticultural Sector
This paper examines how the contracting of French beans has engendered conflict over rights, obligations and resources in Meru District, Kenya. In response to pressure for agricultural diversification and the expanding European market for "gourmet" vegetables, horticulture, the historical domain of women, has been rapidly intensified, commoditized and in many cases, appropriated by men. Women have responded to the erosion of their rights in ways …
From What We Wear to What We Eat Upgrading in Global Value Chains
Summaries In recent academic debates, upgrading has emerged as a key way for developing countries to meet the competitive challenges of globalisation and trade liberalisation. This article draws on global commodity chains literature to comparatively explore the conditions within which upgrading occurs in two sectors: export horticulture in Kenya and textile/apparel in Tamil Nadu, India. In both sectors upgrading into new products, functions or ma…
Gender and Witchcraft in Agrarian Transition: The Case of Kenyan Horticulture
This article examines the social effects of contract farming of export horticulture among smallholders in Meru District, Kenya. During the 1980s and 1990s, contracting was popularized by donors and governments alike as a way to reduce poverty and increase opportunities for self-employment in rural areas. Considerable research has documented the tensions in social relations that emerge in such cases, giving rise to gendered struggles over land, la…
A Gendered Value Chain Approach to Codes of Conduct in African Horticulture
I Sell My Labour Now”: Gender and Livelihood Diversification in Uganda
During the 1990s, the economic reform policies adopted by the Ugandan government delivered some of the highest growth rates in Africa. However, despite Uganda's impressive macroeconomic performance, poverty remains intractable among certain groups such as rural female-headed households (FHHs). Recent studies have shown the important role that diversification into non-farm activities can play in contributing to poverty reduction and enhancing the …
Changing Governance Patterns in the Trade in Fresh Vegetables between Africa and the United Kingdom
Over the past twenty years the marketing of African fresh vegetables in the United Kingdom has become dominated by large retailers that have adopted competitive strategies based on quality, year-round supply, and product differentiation. This has led to a dramatic change in marketing channels, from wholesale markets to tightly knit supply chains. Global value chain analysis is used to explain why the various stages of production and marketing hav…
On Farm and Packhouse: Employment at the Bottom of a Global Value Chain
The fresh vegetables commodity chain linking Kenyan producers with United Kingdom (UK) consumers employs significant numbers of workers in production and processing. This chain is dominated by UK retailers that determine the production imperatives of Kenyan firms upstream in the chain and, indirectly the employment strategies they adopt. This paper explores how competitive pressures are transmitted through the supply chain, and how exporters abso…
Fields of Obligation: Rooting ethical sourcing in Kenyan horticulture
It was not so long ago that mangoes, papaya and snow peas evoked images of tropical climes and exotic peoples. Recently, however, the consumption of so-called luxury fruits and vegetables has elicited a different sort of imagery. Far from the lure of seductive landscapes, today’s consumer is confronted with haunting images of toxic fields, child slavery and the African poor. Such images are part of a new morality of consumption, where consumers, …
Reaching the marginalised? Gender value chains and ethical trade in African horticulture
Ethical trade, through codes of practice, forms an important part of the value chains for horticultural products sourced from Africa by major European buyers. This paper explores the relationship between value chains in the horticultural sector, the employment patterns of African producers, and the process of code implementation from a gender perspective. It asks whether, in the context of the gendered economy, codes alone can improve working con…
Benevolent Intent? The Development Encounter in Kenya's Horticulture Industry
This article examines the trajectory of development policy and practice through the case of the Kenyan export trade of fresh produce. It traces how African labor, particularly women's labor, has been harnessed and restructured by three models of development: (1) the neoliberal prescriptions for agricultural diversification and contract farming; (2) the post-Washington consensus of pro-poor growth; and (3) the Corporate Social Responsibility movem…
Assembling flowers and cultivating homes: Labor and gender in Colombia
Assembling Flowers and Cultivating Homes: Labor and Gender in Colombia, by Greta Friedemann-Sanchez. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 192 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-0979-3, ISBN-10: 0-7391-0979-0 (h
Market Affections: Moral Encounters with Kenyan Fairtrade Flowers
This paper explores commodity exchange as a morally inflected practice, one that mediates competing tensions of greed and generosity, the sacred and profane, and affection and estrangement through the fairtrade flower. Using the UK-Kenya fairtrade flower commodity chain to examine the cultural economy of fairtrade, I suggest that like the charity business and the international development industry, fairtrade complicates the distinction between th…
Arbitrating risk through moral values: The case of Kenyan fairtrade
This chapter examines the Kenyan Fairtrade flower as a site of value making, one that provides a constructive lens into how moral obligation and ethical accountability are shaped by risk perceptions and become visible through the process of transnational commodity exchange. Specifically, it argues that while Fairtrade labeling responds to the risks of corporate capitalism through consumption practices predicated on extending care and compassion t…
In the Mists of Development: Fairtrade in Kenyan Tea Fields
Increasing numbers of consumers see themselves as ‘partners’ in poverty reduction, purchasing Fairtrade products to offset inequalities in the global economy and to ensure that producers in developing countries enjoy the same basic rights and freedoms as their Western counterparts. Yet the extent to which ethical consumption is restructuring commodity chains in a way that diminishes hierarchies between producers and consumers remains an open ques…
Stewards of Virtue? The Ethical Dilemma of CSR in African Agriculture
In recent years companies have responded to increasingly powerful consumer politics by expanding the scope of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include ethical trade. This article examines the ethic embedded in and promulgated through ethical trade by use of a case study of African agriculture. Building on recent conceptualizations of globalization, neoliberalism and anthropological analyses of the audit economy, the authors put forward th…
Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields
Re-siting corporate responsibility
The bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) approach is championed as a way to deliver both corporate profits and poverty reduction. This article explores how "the poor" are repurposed as the instruments of ethical capitalism through the archetypal BOP model-Avon Cosmetics. A harbinger of "compassionate capitalism," Avon has long stylized its entrepreneurial opportunity as a channel to a transcendent realm of self-actualization and social transformation. The…
The new face of development: The ‘bottom of the pyramid’ entrepreneurs (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)
In recent years, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP) initiatives – from Grameen Phone Ladies and Solar Sister, to Women First and Living Goods – have captured increasing attention, not only in corporate boardrooms where the desire for untapped revenue streams looms large, but also in the arenas of development policy and practice, where entrepreneurship is celebrated as a way to repurpose ‘informal’ and/or ‘subsistence’ workers through new forms of priv…
Asr Forum: Engaging With African Informal Economies
Over the last decade, the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) approach has gained prominence as a tool of "inclusive" capitalism in sub-Saharan Africa. This approach reframes development as a seamless outcome of core business activities, one that can ameliorate poverty by bringing much-needed products and services to the poor and generating employment opportunities for informal and subsistence workers as "micro-entrepreneurs." Yet while transnational cap…
Business as a development agent: Evidence of Possibility and Improbability
An emphasis on making markets work for the poor has thrust companies into the role of 'development agents' - organisations that consciously seek to deliver outcomes that contribute to international development goals. This paper examines what business as a development agent means in terms of the promise, the conceptualisation and the developmental outcomes of several initiatives engaged in 'bottom billion capitalism'. It argues that, while these i…
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible: Framing political engagement through the Buycott app
Remaking Africa's Informal Economies: Youth, Entrepreneurship and the Promise of Inclusion at the Bottom of the Pyramid
In recent years, the quest for 'inclusive markets' that incorporate Africa's youth has become a key focus of national and international development efforts, with so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP) initiatives increasingly seen as a way to draw the continent's poor into new networks of global capitalism. SSA has become a fertile frontier for such systems, as capital sets its sights on the continents' vast 'under-served' informal economies, harn…
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility ( CSR ) came into focus in the 1990s in response to mounting pressure from global‐, national‐, and local‐level institutions for corporations to be held accountable for moral failings—from financial scandals and environmental devastation to human rights abuses. It emerged as a platform to deliver sustainable development and address environmental and community development issues vis‐á‐vis commercial enterprise. CSR i…
Political science (25 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Innovation and Socioeconomic Development (21 works) · Economics (18 works) · Global trade, sustainability, and social impact (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Business (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Law (8 works)