Abstract
As far back as the 19th century, the notion of a ‘social pyramid’ was critiqued in the social sciences as an inadequate and simplistic model of society. The model encourages the idea that those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) are uniformly mediocre and the small number at the top overtly exceptional—social pyramid thinking not only tends to reflect differences in incomes but blends together other ‘traits’ such as talent, genius, values, practices and so on. Despite the disfavour in the social sciences throughout the 20th century about the notion of a social pyramid, the concept is now enjoying a renaissance in business, marketing and management theory in ‘frontier’ understandings of poverty in places such as Brazil and India. This article argues that the idea of vested ‘globals’ at the top of the pyramid (ToP) transgresses the concept of a social pyramid because India’s ToP engages with the BoP from afar, remotely and in ways difficult to trace. Crucially, it is not those in India’s BoP who are demanding of inquiry, but instead those at the ToP in terms of their stakes in India’s austerity and their lived distance from these austere conditions.
As far back as the 19th century, the notion of a ‘social pyramid’ was critiqued in the social sciences as an inadequate and simplistic model of society. The model encourages the idea that those at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) are uniformly mediocre and the small number at the top overtly exceptional – social pyramid thinking not only tends to reflect differences in incomes but blends together other ‘traits’ such as talent, genius, values, practices and so on. Indeed, the Anthropologist Ammon even suggested that in some cases, the true form of ‘the so-called Social Pyramid’ is ‘a somewhat flat onion or turnip’ (1899: 218).
The dissatisfaction with the concept of a social pyramid derived partly from its misuses in the 19th century in order to generalize about the poor. The evangelist Reverend Long’s ‘Five Hundred Questions on the Social Conditions of the Natives of Bengal’ maintained: ‘You may educate the upper classes highly, but the masses are the basis of the social pyramid; without this being secure, the apex has no stability’ (1866: 62).
In the 19th century, India was part of the British Empire; therefore, its people’s welfare was, for many in Britain, their responsibility. But unlike the poor in Britain, India’s BoP also allegedly suffered from religious impoverishment. The insecurity, both spiritually and productively, of this huge cohort of recently acquired British citizens played hugely on the colonial mind.
In response, a religious as well as economic intervention towards India’s BoP was sought. This movement targeted India’s poor and sought to make them customers for the Empire’s products and at the same time advocates of its values and ethics. Elsewhere I have argued that this process of intervention involved branding India’s BoP and the belief system that governed them (perceived as Hinduism for the most part) as innately unproductive – India’s people were portrayed as gripped by an energy sapping (H)indolence (Birtchnell, 2009). And it was this very intervention that Mahatma Gandhi sought to counteract in his own social transformation through ideologically co-opting the support of India’s BoP (Birtchnell, 2012). And now, there is the same trend with the excitement about jugaad as a method for the top of the pyramid (ToP) to profit from the BoP (Birtchnell, 2011).
So despite the disfavour in the social sciences throughout the 20th century about the notion of a social pyramid, the concept is now enjoying a renaissance in business, marketing and management theory in ‘frontier’ understandings of poverty in places such as Brazil and India (Achrol and Kotler, 2012; Prahalad, 2010). Current thought on this topic is polarized into two camps. At one pole is the imagination of a vast untapped fortune awaiting those who can bring the poor at the BoP to the global market through helping them help themselves. All this requires is ingenuity, local knowledge and conditions conducive to global capitalism in order to provoke regional development.
At the other pole are those who perceive such excitement about an untapped fortune lying dormant within India’s austere conditions as a cynical manifestation of evangelical marketing (Karnani, 2009). Proselytizing to those currently living outside the global production and consumption system is driven by the conviction that the way to alleviate poverty is through the BoP becoming global consumers, responsible taxpayers and law-abiding citizens dependent on multinational corporations for their livelihoods rather than on informal markets, state welfare and subsidies.
The viewpoint of a bonanza at the BoP rests on a number of key assumptions that the poor require top-down social transformation in order to ameliorate themselves, that free markets and global production systems are the best method for provoking social transformation in much more profound ways than local systems can and that poverty manifests itself as unfulfilled consumer expectations and experiences of deprivation that can be remedied by consumer reform. Indeed, the poor are not passive in this process, but instead are imagined to be co-producers wherein their skills and indigenous capacity for innovation can be tapped by global corporations and intermediaries who operate at the ToP.
The key assumptions in the criticism of this viewpoint as evangelical marketing is that development is more likely to occur through interests which are not vested in profit; that access to consumption is not the primary issue in poverty, but rather it is access to social mobility, financial support and civil services that is needed; that free market capitalism and neoliberalism has not eradicated poverty in the regional poster child for these ideals – the United States; that the poor are already part of global production systems through their informal labour services, which multinational corporations exploit without alleviating poverty; and that the poor are better off insulated from global production systems, tax regimes and meritocratic ideals.
Recently, there have been tentative attempts to find a middle ground in particular through examining the role of intermediation (Ansari et al., 2012; Kistruck et al., 2012). Yet, what has been overlooked in both sides of the debate is the role of what sociologists Elliott and Urry (2010) identify as intermediary ‘globals’ with mobile lives and the fortune they make from the BoP.
This idea of vested globals transgresses the concept of a social pyramid because India’s ToP engages with the BoP from afar, remotely and in ways difficult to trace. Crucially, as I have explored elsewhere, it is not those in India’s BoP who are demanding of inquiry, but instead those at the ToP in terms of their stakes in India’s austerity and their lived distance from these austere conditions (Birtchnell, 2013). Their role in orchestrating India’s future is pivotal in positive reports of the BoP as compatible with global corporate capitalism and in consequent plans for intervention into India by those operating outside of its borders.
Neither the notion of a benevolent capitalism seeking to bring the poor to the global market nor a malicious capitalism trying to exploit the poor in India does justice to how key actors with stakes in India’s austerity at the ToP utilize the international dimensions of austerity rather than passively participate in what Economist Friedman (2008) calls the ‘flattening’ of the world. India’s social pyramid is in fact much more like an iceberg with the tip existing in an utterly different space – different rules, conditions and forces apply above and below the waterline.
So then the idea of the fortune at the BoP is that the rising tide will lift all boats. Currently, disagreement focuses on how seaworthy these boats are. But what happens if you introduce icebergs into the metaphor as well?