Building Partnerships to Create Social and Economic Value at the Base of the Global Development Pyramid
By J. Calton, P. Werhane, L. Hartman, D. Bevan. Journal of Business Ethics, 2013
131 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper builds on London and Hart’s critique that Prahalad’s best-selling book prompted a unilateral effort to find a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). Prahalad’s instrumental, firm-centered construction suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a buccaneering style of business enterprise devoted to capturing markets rather than enabling new socially entrepreneurial ventures for those otherwise trapped in conditions of extreme poverty. London and Hart reframe Prahalad’s insight into direct global business enterprise toward “creating a fortune with the base of the pyramid” (p. xi) rather than at the BoP. This shift in language requires a recalibration of strategic focus, we argue, and will necessitate implementation of “moral imagination” to formulate new mental models that can frame the possibility of local entrepreneurs working collaboratively and discursively with development partners drawn from civil society, corporate, and government sectors. Successful partnerships will arise from interactive processes of emergent, co-creative learning within a shared problem domain or “community of practice”. We call attention to three related pluralist framings of situated learning within such communities of practice: (1) decentered stakeholder networks; (2) global action networks; and (3) a focus on “faces and places” as a cognitive lens to humanize and locally situate diverse inhabitants within base of the pyramid partnership projects.
Subfields: Business and International Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/42c4543ba7e24f1544177f0ecd079fd22e338c62
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In Business and International Management
Citations in the corpus
- Achieving Shared Triple Bottom Line (TBL) Value Creation: Toward a Social Resource-Based View (SRBV) of the Firm (2018, background): “For example, the business would most likely fail unless local social partners are brought into the business during market creation and the product development/distribution phase (Calton et al. 2013), so identifying these local social partners is a key capability for a social entrepreneur.”
- A Systematic Review of the Bottom/Base of the Pyramid Literature: Cumulative Evidence and Future Directions (2020, background): “While Prahalad and Hart (2002) offered a pragmatic, economic argument for businesses, particularly MNCs, to engage with the BoP segment, others have attempted to provide an ethical/moral basis for the BoP approach (Calton et al. 2013; Hahn 2009; VanSandt and Sud 2012).”