Market empowerment - for six days only:an exploration of the empowerment of market actors to constitute, perform and dismantle

This paper explicates the enduring and permanent structures that empower market organisers to act as they shape the temporary markets of the Durga Puja festival in India. Market organisers invoke, create and assemble market devices that empower market actors to perform these temporary markets. Using a visual sociology methodology we show how organisers calculate and intervene to empower certain market actors - specifically, ‘those at the BoP’, as well as to disempower certain forms of action - the use of toxic substances in the production of the Durga icon. We show how sometimes market empowerment and disempowerment are sustained beyond the performance of the temporary market, transforming the community and environmental practices. In this way, the paper foregrounds the two-way relationship between broader social structures and the performance of temporary markets by showing how market practices sometimes spread out beyond the market and become part of the broader structures of everyday life

Managing to make market agencements:the temporally bound elements of stigma in favelas

How do entrepreneurs working at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) manage to make new, powerful, associations between people and places to break down the barriers of Rio’s stigmatised markets? Drawing on the notion of agencement and, specifically, the role of historical narrative devices in generating agencements, this paper offers a nuanced conceptualisation of BoP markets as stigmatised marketplaces, a deeper understanding of the work done by micro-entrepreneurs (MEs) to make market engagement possible, and insights into the temporally bound nature of agencement in recursively enabling safe times to visit a novel favela tourism market at the BoP. This is the first study to explicate the temporal nature of a market agencement

The role of proximity in business model design:making business models work for those at the bottom of the pyramid

This paper explores the role of proximity in designing business models that work for those at the BoP. BoP markets represent an extreme setting where actors struggle to access and organise limited resources and develop appropriate socio-economic-political practices. Drawing on Boschma’s (2005) concept of proximity, we analyse three historical cases of business at the BoP to uncover the spatial-temporal dimensions of business model design in practice. Findings suggest that 1) business model design practices iteratively structure connections with markets and open up new spaces for market activity. This means that business models are necessarily understood as plastic and continuously in-the-making; 2) by taking into account the stability and change of proximity dimensions and the dynamics between them as they relate to business activities, managers are better equipped to identity opportunities that create, shape and connect with markets; and 3) the spatial-temporal dynamic of the business model proximities framework reveals that some proximities strengthen others through time, with negative and positive consequences

Markets and marketing at the bottom of the pyramid

Concern with the role of markets in the lives of the poor has been growing consistently in management and marketing academic communities over the past two decades. Since the publication of CK Prahalad’s HBR article, and bestselling book (Prahalad, 2006; Prahalad and Hammond, 2002), an increasing number of scholars have turned their attention to understanding markets as a means to alleviate poverty and engaging the poor in economic life. The importance of markets and how they are performed is thought to be central to making better and more inclusive societies and to improving the lives of those at the bottom of pyramid (BoP). Indeed, those adopting a market studies approach would argue that ‘building markets is one of the most ordinary ways to produce society’ (Geiger et al., 2014: 1) – putting markets at the centre of the everyday practices of the poor. In concerning ourselves with BoP markets, we assert a very specific aim – to understand how market configurations that take into account the various concerns associated with unfolding economic transactions come about (Chakrabarti and Mason, 2014). Specifically, we start from the premise that (1) consumers cannot consume unless they are able to produce – an activity that generates the means for market engagement and consumption (Karnani, 2007; Viswanathan et al., 2010), (2) market practices are always situated in the particularities of time and place (Kjellberg and Helgesson, 2007) and as such cannot be divorced from histories and associations and (3) the globalisation of trade and markets entangles multiple and complex social–political–economic worlds in chains of practices that stretch across the globe (cf. London and Hart, 2011; Maurer, 2012). This approach calls into question extant conceptualisations of BoP markets as purely economic constructs. As Geiger et al. (2014: 3) explain, ‘Rather than simply replacing or overlaying social bonds with economic transactions, markets initiate a plurality of social relations of a new kind, bearing matters of concern that should be carefully monitored. They invite us neither to reject the economic dynamics of markets nor to try to purify them from any remaining social relations, but rather to search for modalities of organization that are all the more relevant for the implementation of market exchange’, one might add that this is pertinent – in any given BoP context. Indeed, it is notable that market actors often ignore deviant behaviours that result from balancing normative compliance with valuing the role of community in the practice of markets (Christensen et al., 2001; Layton, 2009). Such conceptualisations enable us to ‘…deconstruct the current axiomatic treatment of transaction-centric markets and to reconstruct the market as a socially embedded institution in which community ties are formed and sustained’ (Varman and Costa, 2008: 141). In this brief editorial, we draw on this unfolding understanding of what markets are and how they work to consider how we might re-conceptualise BoP markets, where we might find them and how our concerns about BoP markets are beginning to shape understanding, theorising and action

Market driving at Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP):An analysis of social enterprises from the healthcare sector

To date, scholarly understanding of external dimensions of market driving for the purposes of ‘societal change’ is largely unexplored in both developed and emerging market contexts. This paper uses a multiple case study approach to understand how market driving social enterprises (across the hybrid spectrum) create societal change in emerging markets. By drawing on Scott's (1995) three-part conceptualization of institutional legitimacy, this study explores how regulative, normative and cognitive legitimacies are invoked by market driving social enterprises at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP). Key contributions of the study show that all three dimensions of legitimacy are relevant but they need to be invoked in a specific order based on necessary and optional conditions. An implication of the study is that market driving through societal change can lead to the construction of new and more inclusive healthcare markets

Why art matters:Artistic consumer-entrepreneurship in subsistence marketplaces

This reflective essay explores the role art can play in subsistence marketplaces, focusing particularly on its role in consumer-entrepreneurship. Using informal field engagement in Mexico, Tanzania, and Native American tribes, in dialogue with the literature, it poses three questions as the basis for a research agenda: How can consumer-entrepreneurs preserve art and heritage to sustain socioeconomic value? What transformative role does art play in subsistence marketplaces for the consumers and entrepreneurs involved? How can indigenous consumers and entrepreneurs protect their cultural identity and sovereignty through art? Directions for future research include the need to better understand the role of assemblages and intermediaries for artisan consumer-entrepreneurs, an issue with evident policy implications. As indigenous and near-indigenous societies seek identity, meaning, and cohesion in a turbulent world, art can preserve, transform, and assert

Investigating motivation among international market intermediaries

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