Abstract
While the slogan ‘Make Poverty Business’ has become integral to neoliberal discourses on global poverty management, what often goes unremarked is the role of women, especially poor third world women in profitable poverty ventures. Taking the ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ (BOP) approach as an entry point, the present article brings into sharpened focus the centrality of poor third world women in the ‘global order of poverty management.’ Drawing on Foucaultian notions of problematization, combined with feminist insights on the stakes involved in instrumentalizing women and their subjectivities, and a Marxist-inspired notion of immaterial labor, the article examines how poor third world women are incorporated into profitable poverty eradication ventures. I argue that the construal of poor third world women as knowable objects of knowledge and entrepreneurial subjects remains at the heart of the BOP programmatic. Where, at one level, poor third world women’s participation lends ethical credence to the BOP projects; at another level, their immaterial labor helps to build ‘economies of affect’ at the bottom of the pyramid. Located at the intersection of neoliberalism and feminism, the article aims to add to the ongoing debates on the uneasy proximity between women’s empowerment and ‘neoliberal reason.’
Keywords
Introduction
No longer invisible, superfluous, or disposable, women have evidently become integral to newer discourses on global poverty management (Roy, 2010). The emergence of women, especially the hitherto marginal figure of the poor third world woman, 1 as a staging ground for neoliberal poverty management initiatives lies at the center of this present analysis. The inquiry operates at two levels. First, broadly, it offers a commentary on neoliberalism as it touches down in specific sites and situations, where, among other things, ‘crisis’ (economic marginality, social deprivation, financial contingency, environmental hazards) is increasingly being reframed as an opportunity or asset that, if managed well, can foster social development, economic recovery, and wealth creation (Adams, 2012; Chatterjee, 2014; Dolan, 2012; Rankin, 2001; Roy, 2007). Even as some scholars proclaim neoliberalism dead, others insist that while the ‘roll-back’ phase of neoliberalism (that is, withdrawal of Keynesian Welfare state accompanied by an intense drive toward marketization, privatization, commodification, and deregulation) might have been pared down, the neoliberal ‘logic’ marked by what Peck (2010: 106) calls ‘compromise, calculation, and contradiction’ remains globally hegemonic (Harvey, 2007). Neoliberalism, for present purposes, is defined not as a ‘world homogenizing system’ but one that is flexible, local, heterogeneous, and contingent—characterized by multiple sources, forms, effects, affects, and outcomes (Ong, 2007). It is against this background that the article engages with neoliberalism from the vantage point of global poverty management, which I argue highlights with considerable clarity some of the hegemonic features of ‘actually existing neoliberalism.’
Second, specifically, the article examines critically a particular neoliberal project (i.e. the BOP initiative). Located at the center of business-poverty discourses and credited with popularizing more than any other approach the ‘business-case’ for poverty alleviation, the BOP program provides a point of departure for understanding the specific ways in which states of poverty, scarcity, and marginalization are recast into newer topographies of enterprise, innovation, and profit. I argue that the transformation of the ‘economies of need’ (Adams, 2012) into spaces of capital, 2 among other things, turns on the constitution and activation of certain kinds of ‘objects’ (targets, fields) of knowledge, regulation, and intervention as well as creation and facilitation of particular sorts of ‘subjects’ (agents) and subjectivities (‘conscience, identity, self-knowledge’; Cruikshank, 1999) at the bottom of the pyramid. The objects and subjects/subjectivities that I speak of—so vital to the economics of ‘win-win’ that underwrite the neoliberal consensus on global poverty—coalesce around the figure of the women at the bottom of the pyramid. By foregrounding the ways in which women, particularly, the poor third world women are problematized as certain kinds of objects and subjects, or, the ways in which specific subjectivities are called forth in the BOP project, I strive to illuminate what often remains unremarked about the larger neoliberal conjuncture—that it is thoroughly gendered. Here, I take seriously feminist scholar Rosalind Gill’s (2008: 443) question: ‘[c]ould it be that neoliberalism is always-already gendered, and that women are constructed as its ideal subjects’? While noteworthy, Gill’s question must to be qualified with another observation: neoliberalism is also always-already raced and classed (see Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012; Duggan, 2003). This line of thinking suggests that there are particular kinds of gendered, raced and classed bodies—in our case women of color at the bottom of the pyramid mostly (not exclusively) in the Global South—who are, in most cases, likely to be summoned to energize and sustain neoliberal transformative projects. The present article offers an analysis of the BOP program highlighting the ways in which (and toward what ends) poor third world women are incorporated and assimilated into BOP ventures. Such an exercise, I contend, will not only deepen our understanding of the specific moments and modalities of gendered neoliberal regimes (as exemplified by the BOP programmatic) but also help us track some of the larger discursive, material, and affective stakes in the worldwide ascendency of neoliberal capitalism.
The article contributes on two registers. First, it seeks to add to the ongoing debates at the intersection of neoliberalism and feminism, where, among other things, critical feminist scholars have called attention to ‘troubling appropriations’ or ‘selective incorporations’ of feminist agendas and interests by dominant neoliberal projects (Eisenstein, 2005; Fraser, 2009; Mohanty, 2013). It is in this context that the article reflects upon a particularly illuminating case of what has been referred to as ‘transnational business feminism’ (TBF) ‘a politico-economic project’ led by a growing coalition of governmental, non-governmental agencies, international donors, and multinational corporations focused on making the business case for gender equality (Roberts, 2014: 210). Central to the TBF framework is the idea that investing in women and girls is beneficial to nations, communities, as well as women and girls themselves. Fusing liberal feminism (which, among other things, prioritizes individualism and market participation as solutions to gender oppression) with neoliberal rationality, TBF, especially in the context of Global South, ‘unproblematic[ally] link[s] women’s interests, development, and corporate profitability’ (Roberts, 2012: 92). Using the BOP proposition as a jumping-off point, the article furthers our understanding of TBF by exploring the ways in which poor third world women’s interests and concerns are mobilized and appropriated to establish and legitimize market-led poverty alleviation programs in the Global South. Second, by interrogating the question of women within the BOP domain, the article gives point and force to recent critiques of the unqualified celebrations of entrepreneurship as an inherently positive economic activity, a notion that forecloses the possibility that under certain circumstances ‘entrepreneurial activities . . . might contribute to the problems they are trying to eliminate’ (Calas et al., 2009: 566). In this sense, the exploration undertaken here adds to the ongoing critical dialogues on entrepreneurship (among others, see Calas and Smircich, 2014; Calas et al., 2009; Essers et al., 2017) where scholars emphasize the contingent and contested nature of entrepreneurial activity; along with the need to locate it within historical and social contexts so as to resist the tendency to universalize entrepreneurship as a panacea for redressing all manner of trials and tribulations.
Background
Located at the intersection of several fields like management, development, and corporate social responsibility, the BOP proposition rests on a radical repositioning of the relationship between business and poverty. Put forth by CK Prahalad (1914–2010), well-known management professor and consultant, the BOP program framed the poor not as helpless victims and recipients of aid but as ‘resilient entrepreneurs and value conscious consumers’ (Prahalad, 2006: 3) offering growth opportunities for multinational companies. In recent years, the emphasis on ‘selling to the poor’ has given way to partnering and co-creating with the poor in a bid to create mutually beneficial value propositions. What is noteworthy, here, is that since its inception women have been at the center of the BOP proposition. The entire narrative of dissolving the dissonance between profit and poverty, to a large part, depends on mobilizing and accommodating poorer women into BOP inspired market-led poverty alleviation ventures. Indeed, enhancing women’s participation, inclusion, and engagement (see Prahalad, 2006; Simanis and Hart, 2008) is deemed central to the success of the BOP practices on the ground. In their review of the decade long BOP scholarship, Kolk et al. (2013) find that ‘by far’ two cases are repeatedly drawn on as reference points in BOP writings, namely: Hindustan Lever Ltd. (HLL) and Grameen Bank. Noticeably, both these cases take women to be their main constituency accentuating the women-centric focus of BOP concepts, practices, and strategies.
Recently, a number of scholars have subjected the BOP proposition to close scrutiny, including Kirnani (2007, 2009), Cross and Street (2009), Bonsu and Polsa (2011), Arora and Romijn (2012), and Chatterjee (2014, 2016). However, despite the centrality of women in the BOP narratives, there are hardly any studies that examine critically ‘the question of women’ within the BOP domain. The present article strives to address this gap in the BOP literature by attending to the ways in which women are positioned vis-a-vis BOP-led poverty alleviation propositions. It is worth mentioning that the idea of entrepreneurship as a cure for poverty alleviation echoes larger shifts in global developmental thinking where more and more women are mobilized as active ‘instruments’ and agents of development (Cornwall and Whitehead, 2007). Indeed, the turn towards women-centric development has led to what Roy (2007: 30) calls the ‘feminization of policy’ grounded in ‘[an] unshakable faith in the morality (read: economic success) of women-oriented policies.’ It is this important backstory of women’s shifting position (from victims, suppliants to agents, partners) within the realm of international development that the BOP program both draws on, and adds to, as it sets out to create market-led opportunities for women at the bottom of the pyramid.
The article is organized as follows. In the next section, I outline a conceptual framework for the study. In the fourth section, I offer a close reading of the seminal BOP texts to understand: (a) the constitution of women as objects of particular kinds of knowledge formation, intervention, and remediation; and (b) the ways in which (and towards what ends) their ‘subjecthood/subjectivities’ (be it agentive, entrepreneurial, or sovereign-consumer) are mobilized and harnessed within the BOP domain. The fifth section takes a look at the concrete practices and mechanisms through which women are incorporated and assimilated into BOP ventures. If, as Berlant (2011) claims, the ‘clarifying power of any concept is empirical’ then ICICI’s self-help groups (SHGs), HLL’s Shakti Project, and DuPont’s Solae BOP protocol offer particularly clarifying insights about the ways in which women are summoned and assimilated into BOP projects as neoliberal subjects par excellence. In the concluding section, I tie-up the main arguments of the article, and delineate the significance of the present undertaking for future research on BOP inspired poverty eradication ventures especially in the context of confronting the uneasy proximity between women’s empowerment and ‘neoliberal reason’ (Brown, 2015).
Conceptual frames
The critical-theoretical framework of the present study is anchored within three intellectual domains, which despite differences offer compelling insights for a gendered 3 analysis of the BOP proposition. First, I draw on Foucaultian notions of problematization to underscore how it came to be that the marginal figure of the poor third world women became discernable and recognizable as an object of investigation for which different strategies and practices (solutions) were called forth within the BOP domain. For Foucault (1994: 11) problematization, among other things, entails examining ‘how the different solutions to a problem have been constructed . . . [and] . . . how these different solutions result from a specific form of problematization.’ On this account, problematization speaks to the ways in which events, situations, states of affairs are constituted as problems, as objects to be known, or, as questions to be answered; and, since it is a historically conditioned practice it is linked invariably to the interplay of power and knowledge (Deacon, 2000; Rabinow, 2002). For our purposes, problematization is empowering for thinking about how and for what purposes poor third world women are ‘constituted’ as knowable objects or targets of reform amenable to BOP-led poverty eradication ventures. That BOP interventions and correctives are results of the particular ways in which poor third world women are ‘questioned, analyzed, classified, and regulated’ (Deacon, 2000: 127) within neoliberal regimes of poverty management is foregrounded in the notion of problematization.
Second, the article is animated by recent feminist critiques of development discourses where scholars from different perspectives have examined, among other things: the normalization of poor third world women as ‘easy, efficient, less risky constituencies of development intervention’ (Dogra, 2011: 340); the mobilization of women’s agency and empowerment on behalf of neoliberal considerations to engender individualized, competitive, entrepreneurial projects (Gill, 2008; Prugl, 2014); and, the complicity between entrenched classed, gendered and racialized power structures and knowledge production, which fixes poor third world women as ‘subjects in waiting,’ ideal recruits of neoliberal development ventures (Koffman and Gill, 2013; Wilson, 2011). While closely paralleling these critiques, the article seeks to extend the jurisdiction of feminist concerns to business-poverty relations, an area that, by and large, has escaped critical feminist scrutiny. Towards that end, I bring the weight of two key feminist insights on the question of women within the BOP domain: (a) that the discursive construction of the category of ‘woman’ has been an open site of contestation and struggle that has been historically mobilized towards particular goals and ends (Butler and Scott, 1992; Narayan, 2010); and (b) that subjects/subjectivities are always embodied, multiple, and contingent; and, in no way independent of historical and social situations that condition the complexity and particularity of subjects/subjectivities, in question (Butler, 2004; Smith, 2016). The idea that the category of woman has been strategically moderated towards specific agendas often framed as ‘greater good’ be it, for the sake of colony, nation, culture, or religion (see Narayan, 2010) is helpful in deciphering the dynamics of (neoliberal) power behind the strategic projection of poor third world women as ideal subjects of entrepreneurial development venture. The view of subjectivity as fractured and evolving (decentering notions of Cartesian autonomous self-knowing subjects capable of making universal knowledge claims) facilitates understanding of the stakes involved in the construction of poor third world women as ‘coherent and stable selves’ innately programmed to be sovereign-consumers/entrepreneurs. Indeed, the feminist uptake of subject/subjectivities as open-ended ‘contingent foundations’ (Butler, 1992) not only gives the lie to the essentialized constructions of poor third world women as always-already entrepreneurial; it also reveals how these categorizations and characterizations are, in fact, historically inflected and institutionally mediated artefacts of power performatively bringing forth desired effects and outcomes.
Third, the article employs the Marxist-inspired notion of immaterial labor 4 to apprehend the ways in which BOP-led entrepreneurial ventures incorporate and mobilize poor third world women towards specific goals and agendas. Immaterial labor, for Negri (2015: 3) produces immaterial goods like ‘caring, affection, communication . . . what . . . can loosely call[ed] ‘generically human’ processes and activities.’ According to Lazzarato (1996: 134) immaterial labor is primarily concerned with the production and ‘command over subjectivity’; it takes the ‘‘ideological’ environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces’ to be its ‘raw material.’ This line of thinking on immaterial labor is productive for apprehending how the BOP domain, a site encoded with neoliberal ideology, channelizes and orchestrates subjectivities of poor third world women to effect ‘cooperative, communicative, and collaborative’ (Hardt and Negri, 2001 quoted in Trott, 2007: 209) labor in the service of BOP-led entrepreneurial ventures. A variant of immaterial labor namely affective labor is of particular relevance, here. Affective labor, as Fumagalli (2011: 10) notes results from the ‘utilization of the relational, sentimental, and cerebral faculties of human beings.’ It is this affective labor of poor third world women that is central to understanding how women were assimilated into BOP-led ‘economies of affect’ at the bottom of the pyramid.
The issues and themes raised in the article transcend particular disciplinary sites. So, even as the article locates itself within the established tradition of critique emanating from management studies especially critical management studies, it borrows, translates, and performs concepts, theories, and notions from fields like development, feminist studies, anthropology, sociology and geography. The present study does not claim to an exhaustive study of the BOP domain. Instead, it focuses on the seminal writings from what is referred to as the first, mainly, Prahalad (2006), and Prahalad and Hart (2002), Hammond and Prahalad (2004), second, Hart and London (2005), London (2007), Simanis (2010) and Simanis and Hart (2008) among others, and more recently the third generation (BoP 3.0) BOP scholarship, that is, Cañeque and Hart (2015). Based on a close reading of the main BOP texts, the article strives to illuminate what Steinmetz (2005: 44) drawing on Alfred North Whitehead calls the ‘epistemological unconscious’ of the BOP domain, that is, the implicit underlying assumptions and presuppositions that the adherents of the BOP proposition might unconsciously take for granted. Much like Bourdieu’s habitus, epistemological unconscious is the terrain of perceptions, criteria, concepts, and norms that are taken to be natural or given within a specific field or formation. The task, here, is to excavate the latent assumptions and unexamined presuppositions that make up the terrain of BOP’s epistemological unconscious insofar as the question of women is concerned. On this account, my ‘data’ is the BOP discourse (broadly defined) with its seminal statements, utterances, deliberations, and claims regarding the ways in which poor third world women are incorporated and managed within the BOP domain. The focus on ‘foundational’ texts is not meant to negate the heterogeneity of BOP scholarship; rather it is meant to signal the importance of some core ideas that continue to influence the BOP domain even as scholars refine older concepts and incorporates newer ones. It must be emphasized that in what follows I take a position that is at once, as Rabinow (2003: 30) put it in another context, ‘critical, curative, and affirmative.’ That is to say, notwithstanding the critical verve of the article, it hopes to curatively and affirmatively lay the ground for understanding how to confront openly and offset some the inconsistencies and contradictions of women-centric entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation.
Problematizing women
Knowable objects
In his book, Prahalad (2006: 108) laments that despite growing evidence of the centrality of women’s role in development ‘very little explicit attention has been paid to actively co-opting women in efforts to build markets and lead the development process.’ For Prahalad, it is this emphasis on women’s inclusion and engagement in market-led poverty alleviation programs that, to a large extent, bequeathed the BOP proposition its emancipatory impulse. As Prahalad (2006: 109) writes: ‘the emancipation of women is an important part of building markets at the BOP.’ On this view, women’s recognition, empowerment, and emancipation are not simply fortuitous byproducts of profitable market-led poverty alleviation programs but central to the task of market making at the bottom of the pyramid. That is to say, the emergence of women as partners and cooperative functionaries remains intrinsic to the logic of BOP market ecosystems.
From its early days, women were seen as both consumers and entrepreneurs whose participation in BOP ventures would not only lead to corporate growth and profitability but also to social good (recall the famous BOP line: ‘doing well by doing good’), that is, enhancement of women’s dignity, choice, and self-esteem. This line of thinking permeates later editions of the BOP proposition. For instance, consider the account of Solae business venture, a BOP protocol Initiative in Andhra Pradesh, India, where authors Simanis and Hart (2008) report that ‘community team members’ (all women) ‘have also expressed an increase sense of pride and self-esteem.’ What comes into view here is that within the BOP domain, women’s involvement in market making is not a purely economic proposition but one that grants the BOP programmatic its social and ethical mandate providing a ‘license to imagine’ a ‘more inclusive brand of business development’ (Simanis and Hart, 2008: 5). On this reading, women’s participation and inclusion serve as a ‘motivational resource’ (Hartman and Honneth, 2006) helping to justify and legitimize the business case for poverty eradication.
While women’s inclusion makes explicit the social and ethical intent of the BOP ventures, it is their problematization as objects of knowledge and reflection that is especially beneficial for the BOP program. Put differently, the ways in which they are apprehended, organized, and stabilized as objects of thought help to engender insights and illuminations on market making at the bottom of the pyramid. One instance of this (‘women as site of knowledge’) is captured in the infamous BOP case, HUL’s (Hindustan Unilever Limited) skin lightening cream, ‘Fair and Lovely.’ Even though the controversy surrounding the case of Fair and Lovely has meant that it has become unmentionable within the permissible BOP narratives, its initial run as an example of a viable BOP venture (it continues to be so) offering a strategic look into the BOP markets, is revealing. In a bid to justify their claim that the poor represent an untapped market, Hammond and Prahalad (2004: 36) draw on Unilever’s success in branding and marketing their product ‘Fair and Lovely’ (a skin lightening moisturizer) among the poorer communities in India. Capturing the positive effects of the product, the authors note: In India a young woman working as a sweeper outdoors in the hot sun recently expressed pride in being able to use a fashion product . . . She has choice and feels empowered because of an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs.
What must be made immediately clear is that the case of Fair and Lovely—held up as an example of Enlightened business practice—has been criticized for its covert racist and sexist connotations (Kirnani, 2007, 2009). An early critic, Kirnani (2009: 6), claimed, among other things, that the use of ‘Fair and Lovely’ as an example of women’s empowerment is ‘morally problematic.’ While sympathetic to this particular position, my concern with the ‘Fair and Lovely’ example is not that it is morally problematic, but, that, it is epistemologically so. Meaning, my concern is with the ways in which this case ‘constitutes and makes intelligible’ (Agamben, 2009a: 9) its object of thought—the ‘young woman working as a sweeper’ specifically, and poorer women, more generally. What is striking is that for both critics as well as advocates of HUL’s ‘Fair and Lovely’ case, this emergent object remains entirely self-evident and self-explicatory, an empirical given, whose seeming transparency (as a locus of reflection and knowledge making related to a whole set of issues concerning market making) is never questioned. That is to say, she becomes immediately available and accessible as ‘raw material’ for reflection helping to inaugurate strategies of intervention at the bottom of the pyramid. In the case of ‘Fair and Lovely,’ the testimonials of a few ‘young sweeper women’ are framed as self-contained narratives on choice and empowerment through consumption-based poverty alleviation strategies. Even as the case was criticized for its racist/sexist undertones, there seemed to be no epistemological discomfort with the ways in which the ‘young sweeper women’ were instituted as an object of knowledge, and how this objectification bestowed on her an ‘unmediated empirical authority’ (Palmie et al., 2009: 2) legitimizing narratives on choice, empowerment, and freedom at the bottom of the pyramid. Indeed, cast as a phenomenon that is, as an ‘empirical referent’ 5 signifying consumption driven emancipation, the lives of the ‘young sweeper women’ come to be marked by a ‘self-sufficient immanence’ (Jay, 1996) removed from the contradictions and constraints that make certain kinds of choices and freedoms available while foreclosing others. Indeed, what were worrisomely absent were questions about the knowledge-power regimes (that is, normative neoliberal rationalities governing discourses on global poverty) that rendered such claims about choice, empowerment, and freedom plausible and intelligible, in the first place. 6
Compounding epistemological worries, the problematization of poor third world women in ‘Fair and Lovely’ displays, to use Edward Said’s (1993: 366–365) words from another context, ‘an astonishing sense of weightlessness with regard to the gravity of history.’ That is to say, even a cursory glance at postcolonial India reveals that poor women working as sweepers typically occupy the bottom of the caste hierarchy and remain socially and economically at the fringes of Indian society. 7 To take the figure of the most marginalized of women as embodiment of choice and empowerment just by the mere use of ‘Fair and Lovely’ is deeply troubling. The point here is not so much to question whether this or that particular woman experienced some sense of self-worth or not by using ‘Fair and Lovely.’ What is troubling is the dissemination and consumption of this case as an early BOP ‘success story’ (signifying empowerment, choice, and freedom) is generative of a highly reductive and biased version of women’s lives at the bottom of the pyramid. It is reductive because it abstracts women from their historical, economic, and political contexts, rendering them discoverable as a sovereign-consumer or energetic entrepreneurs whose new-found spontaneous will and self-esteem seems to be fully capable of countering the long histories of oppression and exploitation. Dehistoricized and depoliticized, ‘she’ becomes an ‘object’ immediately thinkable and knowable in certain ways, which helps to legitimize and universalize particular kinds of knowledges about the Global South; knowledges that enable corporate capital to operate with, using Spivak’s (1986) well-known terminology, ‘sanctioned ignorance,’ which, among other things, entails a willful forgetting of how histories of unequal power relations between the First and the Third worlds continue to impact lives at the bottom of the pyramid. And, it is biased because the case of ‘Fair and Lovely’ overlooks how women must navigate the terrain of colorism/racism (and its articulation with patriarchy and class) in postcolonial societies where ‘fairness’ continues to be valorized as aspirational, signifying social distinction, privilege, and inclusion (Nadeem, 2014).
In the later versions of the BOP project, there is a move towards ‘business intimacy’ (Simanis and Hart, 2008) or ‘developing native capacity’ (Hart and London, 2005) that, at its core, is about initiating ‘deep listening’ and ‘deep dialogue’ with poorer communities (Simanis and Hart, 2008: 2). While the need for a deeper engagement with women is welcome, this move continues to align itself with a dehistoricized and depoliticized understanding of poor third women. First, at a more mundane level, can we assume that the MNCs (one of the most powerful global entities) and the poor third world women are able to enter into ‘deep’ conversations and dialogues without the determining weight of histories surrounding this encounter? Perhaps we would do well to recall Marx’s (1963: 15) famous line: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.’ Clearly, we need to take into account the historical and social circumstances that sets the terms and conditions under which such dialogues and conversations take place. Second, at a more conceptual level, the idea of deep listening disavows the difficulties in recuperating and representing the voices of the ‘other.’ Without going too far afield into postcolonial theory, one might say that based on Spivak’s (2010) well-known essay, ‘Can the subaltern speak,’ the representation of, and access to subaltern consciousness, voice, and will is anything but an unproblematic proposition. Writing in the context of widow-sacrifice (Sati) in colonial India, Spivak (2010: 50) notes that both the imperialist discourses on abolishing Sati, as well as the dominant nativist ones that sought to endorse it by claiming that women ‘actually wanted to die’ ignored the widow’s own voice. As the Spivak (2010: 61) puts it: ‘[b]etween patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object formation, the figure of the women disappears’. Spivak’s (2010) essay is an enduring reminder that dominant discourses and institutions tend to appropriate and domesticate concerns and interests of subaltern women toward expedient ends, which results ultimately in their marginalization and disempowerment. In our context, this means that BOP claims of deep listening must confront the fraught issues surrounding recuperation of poor third world women’s voices as such, whose peripheral location within the global hierarchies of power tends to render their voices mute, or else audible only in interested ways. 8 Indeed, to point out issues surrounding the recovery of subaltern voices is not to render women passive or dependent; rather it is to highlight the irreducible tensions that mark the otherwise well-intentioned calls for initiating deep listening and deep dialogue between the corporations and poor women in the Global South.
Profitable subjects
Within the BOP domain, women are seen as embodiments of energies and capacities that characterize the ‘newest entrepreneurial frontier’: the bottom of the pyramid. Indeed, one of the recurrent themes in the BOP proposal revolves around heroic images of women. From its inception, ‘empowered, organized, networked, and active women’ (Prahalad, 2006: 109) were seen as central to altering the ‘social fabric of society’ at the bottom of the pyramid. For the most part, the BOP domain is marked by, what Braidotti (2005: 172) in another context calls, the ‘syndrome of exceptional women,’ which revolves around the idea that women’s perseverance and hard work as entrepreneurs and partners in BOP ventures will enable them to overcome their historical, social, and economic marginalization. This notion of exceptional women constitutes women as survivors who are ‘worthy of help’ (Dogra, 2011: 342) or, as in our case, worthy of corporate attention (investment worthy) as viable consumer-entrepreneurs. While Braidiotti (2005) critiques how the selective focus on female political and social icons often diverts attention away from the larger collective histories of women’s struggle for emancipation, her insights are generative for thinking about the implications of invoking the idea of exceptional women within BOP discourses. First, the notion of exceptional women generalizes in problematic ways the achievements of individual woman as the sign of women’s emancipation, in general. The projection of the successes of some as a mark of overall improvement in the status of women presents a highly distorted and skewed view of economic and social realities at the bottom of the pyramid. Second, even as teamwork and alliance building are held central to the BOP ecosystem, the focus on exceptional women shows solidarity with the notion of ‘possessive individualism,’ which attributes success to women’s own capacities and resources thereby individualizing success, as well as failures. In one way, this promotes social Darwinism of sorts where the survival of the fittest (read: entrepreneurial) is seen as the mantra for success at the bottom of the pyramid. Third, it glosses over the structural inequities (born of class, caste, race, and so forth) that tend to make it harder for some women to engage in market-led entrepreneurial ventures. Indeed, by short-circuiting collective modes of struggle and survival that marks the lives of poorer women, the celebration of exceptional women tends to, as Braidotti (2005: 172) puts it: ‘foster a sense of isolation among women, and hence new forms of vulnerability.’ And, finally, it recycles essentialist notion about women’s innate qualities, be it, peacefulness, altruism (Molyneux, 2006), ability to nurture, or, as in our case, their so-called natural propensity towards entrepreneurialism, which, paraphrasing Alcoff (1988: 413) promotes unrealistic expectations about the ‘normal’ behavior of women at the bottom of the pyramid.
It should come as no surprise that within the BOP domain, women, primarily, occupy two kinds of subject-positions corresponding to its two main themes: enterprise/entrepreneurialism and consumption. Predictively then, women are constituted either as entrepreneurs and/or sovereign-consumers. Writing in the context of microfinance in Nepal, Rankin (2001: 19) notes that microcredit programs, to a large extent, depend on the production of ‘particular forms of subjectivity’ related to what the author calls the ‘rational economic women’ viewed not as ‘beneficiaries with social rights [but as] clients with responsibilities to themselves and their families.’ In a similar vein, Roy (2012: 135) talks about the ‘icon at the heart of global microfinance’—the Third World Women, or the ‘millennial women’ adding that she is ‘a figure of resilience charged with converting poverty into enterprise.’ In other accounts, scholars have commented on how neoliberal development interventions, in general, routinely valorize subjects who are at once autonomous, rational, calculating, and self-regulating capable of ‘bear[ing] full responsibility for their life biography no matter how severe the constraints upon their action’ (Walkerdine et al., 2001 quoted in Gill, 2008: 436). Indeed, this archetypical neoliberal subject is well represented in the BOP regime.
In the BOP domain, there are many instances where the ideal-neoliberal subject is brought forth albeit under different appellations and contexts. The ‘wireless women of Grameen’ (Hart and Christensen, 2002: 54), or the ‘phone ladies’ (Simanis and Hart, 2006), ‘Shakti Ammas’ (Prahalad, 2006), the ‘Solae team members’ (Simanis and Hart, 2008), ‘Solar Sisters,’ (Dolan, 2012), the ‘Aparajitas’ (rural saleswomen in Bangladesh), among others, are instantiations of the quintessential neoliberal subject. The main features that make up this neoliberal subject, are, by now, well-rehearsed. Within the BOP domain they take on the following hue: they are ‘always already entrepreneurs’ trainable in different aspects of market making (Dolan, 2012); they are responsive to learning the ‘shared business language . . . and are committed and motivated to invest time and ‘sweat equity’ in new business ventures’ (Simanis and Hart, 2008: 22, 27); and they are ‘partners, colleagues, advisors’ (London et al., 2014: 11) whose knowledge, ‘wisdom and expertise’ (London, 2007: 17) are seen as valued inputs towards building sustainable and scalable BOP enterprises. All in all, the gendered BOP subject marked by innate entrepreneurial qualities is amenable to training in market fundamentals, and is a reliable partner capable of collaborative ventures based on mutual learning and trust. What is worth noting here is that even as she tracks many of the features of this Weberian ideal-type (neoliberal) subject, there are certain aspects of the ‘BOP women’ that complicate (and further) our understanding of what it means to be a neoliberal subject in a context, that is, at once gendered and non-western (read raced).
In the later iterations, BOP proposition concepts like, among others, social embeddedness, business model intimacy, and building native capacity take center stage as strategies for value creation. Such an emphasis highlights a move away from contractual relationships towards one that is, in part, based on cultivation of trust, respect, and the promotion of learning, listening, and interdependence between corporations and the poorer communities. Building business intimacy, that is, ‘focus on the long term and the cultivation of humanized relationships that go beyond the purely commercial’ (Reficco and Márquez, 2009: 530) appears to be central to market making at the bottom of the pyramid. This turn toward leveraging social ties and networks; harnessing of ‘emotional commitments and enthusiasm’ (Simanis, 2011: 119) and promoting a sense of shared identity linking the company and the women, I argue, demonstrates efforts to build what might be thought of as ‘economies of affect’ at the bottom of the pyramid. Drawing on their ethnographic work on transnational partnerships between Mexican and Northern non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and steelworkers in a plant in Krakatua, Indonesia, anthropologists Richard and Rudnyckyj (2009: 57) analyze how ‘affect is mobilized to produce subjects in the context of neoliberal transformations,’ for the authors, ‘the notion of ‘economy of affect’ [signifies] a zone in which affect serves as a means of conducting conduct and thus forming subjects’ (p. 57). Be it, through the invocation of friendship, camaraderie, and solidarity between Mexican NGOs and its northern partners; or, through the use of moderate Islam religious instructions to enhance efficiency and performance among steelworkers in Krakatua Steel Plant—affect was ‘not a mere side effect’ of neoliberal transformation but critical to the production and management of subjects facilitating specific neoliberal practices (Richard and Rudnyckyj, 2009). Viewed thus, we may say that the BOP domain with its insistence on relationships, intimacies, and dialogues aims to build and mobilize economies of affect in the service of BOP ventures. For our purposes, we may think of affect as commanding and eliciting emotional attachments, personal ties, enthusiasm, a sense of shared identity, and even a certain sense of striving, drive, and responsibility in BOP subjects. Given that women have traditionally populated the affectively charged realm of ‘caring labor’ it is hardly coincidental that they would be viewed as naturally inclined toward building affective economies.
For Michael Hardt (2009: 90), affective labor is placed ‘at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms’ in our postindustrial informational society. Drawing on feminist analysis Hardt (2009) highlights that while products of affective labor are intangibles (social networks, communication, relations, so forth), there is a strong corporeal and somatic dimension that underpins affective labor. That is to say, affective labor works through the bodily mode producing different kinds of laboring bodies at once disciplined, self-controlled, creative, and communicative. This understanding of affective labor is particularly helpful for thinking about how the affective labor of women is deployed for value creation in the BOP ventures. On this reading, it is through the immaterial or affective labor of women that strategies like ‘social embeddedness,’ ‘native capacity building,’ and ‘business intimacy’ are enacted in a bid to secure long-term corporate-community relations. Indeed, the nomadic bodies of women (peripatetic sari-clad Shakti Ammas carrying their branded bags of products from one village to another) as sites of efficiency, innovation, and enterprise become integral to economics of affect at the BOP. Indeed, these economies of affect at the BOP bear out Kuhn et al.’s (2017: 63) observations that ‘capitalism is thoroughly sensate, an ongoing encounter that embroils bodies and objects in chronic banal performances of market relations.’
Of particular relevance here is that within these economies of affect, the rational economic woman, or, so-called ideal-neoliberal subject, is marked by a particularity, that is, she is repositioned as someone who is not so rational, after all. Stated differently, given the weak institutional settings and lack of market infrastructures at the bottom of the pyramid, the later BOP editions have come to valorize the figure of ‘irrational woman’—someone who is motivated not by legal contracts and other kinds of formal agreements but through affective ties centered on trust, care, and relationships. For instance, attributing the high turn-over rates among Shakti Ammas to the lack of trust between HUL and Ammas, Simanis and Hart (2008: 10) note: [. . .] [a]s contractors the Shakti Ladies have no reason to invest their sweat equity into realizing a longer term vision . . . The important point is that this ‘rational approach’ is not an inherent trait of the Shakti women . . . Disembedded innovation has literally made the Shakti ladies into self-interested, short-term profit maximizing partners.
What we see here is a strategic undoing of the rational economic woman (pace, Rankin, 2001) in the interest of forging long-term relationship between the community and the company. Here, the contractual nature of relationship between Shakti women and the company is seen as a barrier to the goal of building long-term commitments. As rational economic subjects, Shakti Ammas would have no affective ties to HUL, and, therefore, are likely to leave as and when other opportunities surface. This means that they have no reason to invest their ‘sweat equity’ in creating durable partnerships with HUL. So, how are companies to secure loyalty, a sense of shared commitment from these newly instituted self-interested, profit-maximizing partners? The solution to the problems posed by ‘rational economic women’ is to be found in its antithesis: the ‘irrational’ (or emotional) women. Since the rational approach ‘is not an inherent trait’ in the Shakti women, or, for that matter women, in general, at the bottom of the pyramid, BOP ventures that are able to make business ‘personal,’ that is, draw on women’s inherent capacities for trust, care, solidarity, partnerships, and so forth are likely to succeed. What is notable here is that this gendered neoliberal subject framed opportunistically either as self-directed, self-governed, autonomous rational self, or, as subjects saturated by affective charge demonstrates the ways in which race and class come into play in the process of neoliberal subject formation. Leaving aside for a moment questions regarding how terms like ‘building native capacity’ are redolent of orientalist assumptions about otherness (‘the native’ as the other of the western Enlightened self), the construction of inherently irrational (emotional) women illuminates how previous racial colonial discourses are mapped creatively onto the newer neoliberal landscapes (see Chakravartty and Da Silva, 2012). The figure of the third world women marked by both an excess (exceptional, heroic, salvific) and a lack (irrationality, unreason, informality) although both remarkably instrumentalized as resources in economies of affect, rehearses many of the prevalent raced and classed views on ‘the poor.’ This move inadvertently reinstates a difference, that is, the notion that ‘the poor,’ or, as in our case, the poor women in the Global South are different from the rest, in that, they are inherently irrational, motivated not by reason but by passions (hence ‘primitive?’). While orientalist discourses, by and large, disparaged the irrationalities of the natives, within the latest neoliberal discourses, like the one under consideration, ‘irrationality’ is valorized as a locus of value creation—something to be harnessed for the sake of enduring business relationships that give companies long-term competitive edge in ‘difficult’ markets. Indeed, like crisis, irrationality is a terrible thing to waste (paraphrasing Roy, 2010).
The BOP apparatus 9
If, as argued, the constitution of poor third world women as knowable objects and governable subjects remain central to the task of BOP market making, how does it materialize on the ground? That is to say, what are the specific mechanisms and practices that enable BOP ventures to incorporate and assimilate women into marketized poverty alleviation schemes. To broach this question, I briefly examine three popular BOP sites that are frequently referenced in the literature namely ICICI’s ‘Self-Help Group’ (SHGs), HUL’s ‘Shakti Ammas,’ and Solae’s (a subsidiary of DuPont) BOP Protocol Initiative. Highlighting varying degrees of success, these BOP ventures provide concrete manifestations of the ways in which women are interpellated as ideal objects and subjects, and how their subjectivities are recalibrated to serve particular agendas and goals.
The success of ICICI Bank (one of the largest commercial banks in India) in serving the hitherto underserved rural population has been linked to the formation and successful operation of SHGs mainly in the southern states of India. For the ICICI Bank, serving the banking needs of ‘the poorest of the poor’ meant valuing them as customers, clients, and partners—a group whose participation was vital for the bank’s commercial success in the rural areas. Central to this new venture was the formation of a unique program centered on the notion of SHGs that involved ‘form[ing], train[ing], and initiat[ing] small groups of women into formal savings, banking, and lending groups’ (Prahalad, 2006). Through year-long program, women were trained in the virtues of fiscal discipline, leadership, and responsibility that would help them become credit-worthy clients and entrepreneurs. Well-versed in banking services, these women would help to create more SHGs thereby increasing the reach of ICICI bank.
Viewed from this angle, the formation of the SHGs hinges on the fabrication of certain kinds of subjects/subjectivities that are compatible with the goals of ICICI rural banking initiatives. Prahalad (2006: 124) captures this well himself when he writes: ‘the SHG process is oriented toward building new disciplines and capabilities.’ These newer disciplines and capabilities are precisely what provide the conditions of possibility for the transformation of the third world women into self-governing economic subjects generating value for themselves and businesses. Promoting autonomy, self-realization, and responsibility these interventions and trainings seek to constitute bodies marked by what Rose (1999: xxiii) calls ‘autonomization plus responsibilization.’ That is to say, they are at once autonomous, self-managing or ‘self-steering’ individuals as well as governed by new forms of control and self-regulation consistent with the dominant norms of neoliberal responsibilization. Despite scholarship that attests to the disciplining tendencies of neoliberal governmentality (Rankin, 2001; Rose, 1999; Roy, 2010), the BOP domain continues to celebrate SHGs as an unqualified moment of women’s emancipation. Clearly, the BOP narrative rests upon the obfuscation of the calculative and instrumental programming inherent in SHGs where women’s competencies and capacities are harnessed not for promoting social and political well-being but for market creation at the BOP.
While the SHGs populate the terrain of finance and banking, within the market of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs), it is another avatar of the third world women—the direct door-to-door seller that takes center stage. Here, I focus on Unilever’s Shakti Amma’s whose successes have been touted as the new model for consumer-entrepreneurism at the bottom of the pyramid (Prahalad, 2006). An offset of the Shakti Project floated by the Indian subsidiary of Unilever—Hindustan Unilever (HUL) Shakti Ammas function as a direct distribution network helping to extend the market reach of HUL products. These ‘village women entrepreneurs’ are trained by HUL to distribute products and educate customers about their use and value thereby creating demand conditions for HUL’s product. The ‘empowered mothers’ are a classic example of the consumer-entrepreneurs, that is, not only is she a consumer but also an entrepreneur creating value by selling products to others. This ‘one person company’ (Prahalad, 2006) is bound to the parent company HUL by a contract that is based on the economics of mutuality where the success of Shakti Ammas is closely tied to that of HUL’s. The Shakti Amma is posited as a proper economic subject whose entrepreneurial drives coupled with her affective energies helps her find pathways out of poverty and dependency. Even as the BOP discourses position Shakti Ammas as self-motivated entrepreneurs naturally predisposed towards entrepreneurial ventures, the fact remains that the Shakti Ammas, like the SHGs, ‘are not born they are made’ (Dolan, 2012: 4). What needs to be emphasized is that the ‘making up’ of Shakti Ammas through education, training, and other calculative practices draws on a particular notion of the third world woman—as docile, trainable objects and governable subject whose material and immaterial labor can be reconfigured as a source of value and profit. Here anthropologist David Scott’s (1999: 36) insight about how power works ‘through the creation of subjectivity normatively experienced as the source of free-will and rational autonomous agency’ is revealing. As a modality of power, the Shakti initiative not unlike the SHGs—uses the free-will and the autonomous agency of Shakti Ammas as vectors through which market relations are established thereby normalizing dominant neoliberal rationalities at the bottom of the pyramid. It is precisely through the intrumentalization of her agency and autonomy, or the ‘programming of the self’ (Bröckling, 2005) that the neoliberal reason works to create conditions favorable to its perpetuation and regeneration.
Within the later iterations of the BOP project, the Solae Company’s BOP Initiative in India (Andhra Pradesh) provides yet another window into the ways in which third world women are drawn in and recruited for market making at the BOP. A leading manufacturer of soy protein isolates and concentrates, and other soy-based products, the Solae venture was designed to ‘deliver within a sustainable framework enhanced nutritional products to consumers at the bottom of the pyramid’ (quoted in Simanis and Milstein, 2012: 85). Centered on the notion of mutual value creation, the BOP Solae Protocol focused on partnering with groups of women to enhance the reach and scale of Solae products in low income markets. Involving a series of ‘evolutionary and highly interactive’ steps captured in processes like ‘business concept co-creation,’ ‘building deep dialogues,’ ‘business prototype co-creation’ and so forth (Simanis and Hart, 2008), the venture aimed to build a broad value proposition around Solae products. In its final form, the project settled around two groups of women ‘Solae Chiguru’ and ‘Solae Samantha’ who would work in close partnership with the Solae Company (and other local organizations) to create viable business ventures. What is pertinent for our purpose is that Solae BOP protocol revolved around different phases focusing on themes not wholly dissimilar from ones developed for SHGs and Shakti Ammas. Education, training, and mentoring of women into norms of collective entrepreneurship for creating ‘enduring value for the BOP communities while building a foundation for long-term corporate growth and renewal’ was deemed central to the Solae venture (Simanis and Hart, 2008: 58). Within the Solae Initiative, however, a more systematic approach for creating the entrepreneurial habits and sensibilities was attempted. For instance, a large part of the project was dedicated to creation of a ‘business credo’ (Simanis and Hart, 2008) that, among other things, meant educating women in corporate virtues of punctuality (in the context of business—where time is money), responsibility, performativity, flexibility, adaptability, and replicability. These entrepreneurial skills and capabilities were channeled quite deliberately towards ventures that would ‘strengthen . . . [Solae’s position] . . . in terms of scalability, reach, and transformational impact’ (Simanis, 2010: 239). As mentioned earlier, in the absence of market infrastructures, it was the facilitation and mobilization of women’s ‘soft skills’ in creating affective economies that would ensure Solae’s ‘deep reach’ into the BOP community eliminating competition and securing long-term success.
One of the distinguishing features of the Solae Initiative was the ways in which it drew the intimate sphere of domesticity into its strategic calculations. This is exemplified in the efforts to transform the dietary habits of BOP communities; and given that women traditionally inhabit the sphere to domesticity (in this case cooking), it was the transformation of their habits and behaviors that was seen to be paramount in Solae’s success. As Simanis (2010: 232) puts it: ‘the real ‘pay-day’ for Solae would come from getting women to integrate Solae’s protein into their daily cooking habits.’ The ‘necessary behavioral changes’ the author continues, ‘associated with that would be best done through an environment that linked socializing with the learning of those new behaviors.’ Clearly, what is attempted here is not a mechanical change in dietary habits but the facilitation of a new kind of commodified sociality (way of life) built around the pleasures of cooking with soy-fortified products—a move that once again draws on the affective attachments of women to secure the visibility, promotion, and acceptability of global brands. The Solae Initiative is demonstrative of how intimate embodied spaces are drawn into the ambit of enterprise creation where newer affinities, dispositions, and desires are cultivated as ‘inputs’ for achieving competitive advantage. But, the question that arises here is: what happens to the newly cultivated and groomed entrepreneurial dispositions and sensibilities when economic calculations fail, and BOP ventures exit markets leaving behind, as in the case of the Solae’s BOP Protocol Initiative, frail morale and disappointments (see Simanis, 2010)? Given that, as Hart (2015: 3) writes, ‘the last decade is littered with failed remains of the BOP ventures,’ what happens to the indefinitely deferred entrepreneurial motivations and desires? Might it engender what Lauren Berlant (2007: 33) calls ‘cruel optimism’—a condition of maintaining an attachment to a ‘problematic object . . . discovered to be impossible [or a] sheer fantasy [?]’ 10
Conclusion
Increasingly, scholars agree that neoliberalism shows a remarkable ability to incorporate and domesticate crisis for its own self-augmentation (Harvey, 2007; Peck, 2010). The recasting of poor third world women as valuable objects proffering marketable knowledges and resilient entrepreneurial subjects within global poverty management regimes speaks to this incorporative tendency within neoliberalism. The present article explored one of the resonant site of neoliberal normativity, the BOP project to highlight how crisis, in this instance, global poverty is reframed as an opportunity for mass scale entrepreneurship. As argued, the ‘doubling’ (Rabinow, 2002) of poor third world women as particular kinds of objects and subjects remains central to the neoliberal order of poverty management. While, at one level, the poor third world women helped to ethicalize the business case for poverty alleviation, at another level, their participation, among other things, engendered dependable sources of recognizable and accessible knowledges linking markets to choice, empowerment, and freedom at the bottom of the pyramid. As the article argues, the notion of exceptional or heroic entrepreneur places unrealistic (impossible?) expectations on women at the bottom of the pyramid, and ultimately shifts the burdens and responsibilities of well-being onto the individuals themselves. Additionally, the article shows that it is women’s immaterial or affective labor that is commandeered for value creation in-keeping with long-term corporate agendas at the bottom of the pyramid. The valorization of emotions, feelings, affinities, and sensibilities over contractual relations recasts poor third world women as irrational beings driven not by reason but passion—a move that is reminiscent of Orientalizing discourses that fixed ‘the native’ as the other of the enlightened rational (western) self. Indeed, despite their visibility, women remain the unthought ground of the BOP domain. As the unthought, her life is codified and contained in manageable marketable forms that invariably essentializes, totalizes, and homogenizes their experiences of struggle and survival. As a consequence, the BOP proposition paradoxically (and, perhaps unknowingly) ends up excluding poor third world women in the very act of their inclusion. Given this, is it any wonder that BOP ventures tend to fall short (see Hart 2015; Simanis and Milstein, 2012) of their purported emancipatory goals?
So, what is the significance of this article for future scholarship on market-led poverty alleviation ventures, and BOP, specifically? First, by putting theoretical pressure on a new orthodoxy that takes women’s participation in entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation as an unquestioned good, the article foregrounds the need to historicize and politicize the question of women within discourses on global poverty management. On this account, the article redirects attention to the ‘conditions of possibility’ (historical, political) under which women come to be discovered and recognized as ideal (legitimate) consumer-entrepreneurs in the corporate-backed fight against poverty alleviation. With regard to the BOP proposition, the call here is to engage in self-reflexivity that pays heed to the different ways in which marketized initiatives for poverty alleviation instead of confronting, might, in fact, align itself with existing gender hierarchies at the bottom of the pyramid (Karim, 2011; Keating et al., 2010). In this sense, the present inquiry inserts a cautionary note into the shrill celebrations of the purported efficacy of entrepreneurialism as a tool for poverty eradication (also, see Banerjee and Jackson, 2017). Second, the article brings into sharpened relief the need for engaging critically with the theoretical premises and assumptions that underwrite the BOP domain insofar as the question of women is concerned. So, for instance, the article makes explicit that construction of sovereign consumer-entrepreneur as an enabling site of choice and empowerment must be rethought in the light of a nuanced theoretical understanding of how larger hegemonic structures (capitalism, racism, patriarchy) control the parameters within which choice, empowerment, and freedom get defined for historically marginalized groups. This line of thinking has practical resonance as it helps researchers to grasp choice, empowerment, and freedom not as transcendental neutral givens but rather as negotiated practices inflected by cultural, social, and political idioms. On this account, top-down problem-solving strategies that remain insensitive to the complex social and political circumstances that frame discourses on choice, empowerment, and freedom for women could reproduce, albeit under different guises, the very power relations that they seek to undo. Third, and relatedly, the article addresses the lamentable lack of understanding of power within the BOP domain. The present inquiry bespeaks the need to remain wakeful to what Foucault’s calls productive capacities of power to apprehend how it creates ‘autonomous’ individuals willing to engage in self-regulation and self-governance. The notion that the poor third world women might be willing participants in the fictionalization of her own self as ‘always-already’ entrepreneurs, especially in the face of escalating joblessness, flexibilization and informalization of labor markets, demands serious theoretical attention. A critical look at power in the context of entrepreneurship for poverty alleviation also facilitates a grounded understanding of how ‘Transnational Business Feminism’ (TBF) plays out across different sites seamlessly linking women’s priorities and interests with neoliberal agendas and goals. Here, it may be worthwhile to mention that even as the article did not engage in postcolonial analysis per se, it hopes to signal the importance of postcolonial theorizing for future research on TBF, in particular, and global poverty management, in general. Among other things, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives help to illuminate how colonially inflected thinking on race, gender, and class might converge (partially and incompletely) with TBF to create newer knowledge-power regimes that are serviceable to the neoliberal order of poverty management. And, finally, the interdisciplinary labor undertaken, here, hopes to keep the conversation moving among scholars across different disciplinary and theoretical divides, and ethical positions about the need to address the risks and limitations of entrepreneurial approaches to poverty alleviation. On this, a closing note: throughout the writing of this article, I had in mind the woman who sold her herd of goats to invest in the now defunct Solae project (see Simanis, 2010: 331). While an assessment of how this came to pass must await ethnographic research, at the least, it should give us pause. Really, no one should lose their herd of goats in the pursuit of neoliberal dreams.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on the previous draft of this article. I would also like to thank the Associate Editor Timothy Kuhn for his guidance and encouragement. Thanks are due to Amy Whipple for her engagement with the article. Also, I am thankful to Kristen Renzi and Amit Sen for their comments on an earlier draft.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.