The Base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) corporate strategy perceives market-based solutions to the problem of global poverty. The strategy is premised on the view that people in BoP markets live in fundamental lack, which can be overcome with business intervention. The merits of this idea seem obvious, but its ideological premise within contemporary capitalism is often lost on many. The purpose of the authors in this paper is to explore the ideological premise of the BoP strategy. The authors employ Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” to suggest that corporate adoption of the BoP strategy mimics a neocolonial incursion into heretofore inaccessible markets, by constituting the poor as free, self-governing individuals—modern citizens in the Western liberal sense—toward facilitating market control and exploitation for corporate ends.
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