Decolonizing the Bottom of the Pyramid

By engaging the decolonial option, this paper highlights the dark side of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach - which has been overseen in mainstream Western management literature and particularly in marketing studies - in order to foster the liberation of knowledge and being in/though management and organization studies through transmodern pluriversality. More than a market-oriented strategy for corporations to gain fortunes exploring untapped markets constituted by billions of poor consumers, the BoP approach is discussed in this paper as a post-Cold War (geo)political design of Eurocentric modernity, which reinforces the neoliberal/neocolonial order and mobilizes the rhetoric of salvation for rewesternizing the world. Such order bases itself on the assumption that Western-based ideologies are believed to be universal and used as moral obligation of modern civilizations to relieve the ‘poor others’ from an eternal state of immaturity and backwardness. By reinforcing the neoliberal market orientatio...