Selling with Prejudice: Social Enterprise and Caste at the Bottom of the Pyramid in India

Abstract

How do you sell a solar powered lamp to India's un-electrified, rural poor? This contribution to Anthropology for Sale explores the work of direct selling in rural India, reflecting on the forms of prejudice, difference and exclusion that are produced as multinational companies create markets for consumer goods in places of chronic global poverty. In the highlands of Orissa, India, a US company sells solar powered lights through a network of young male sales agents. The company and its products express empathy and proximity, attachment and connection to India's indigenous and low caste communities. Yet the company's salesmen are often more concerned with maintaining forms of structural advantage and their sales practices articulate social differences based on caste, class and gender. Rather than see prejudice as a peripheral effect of expansion and growth in emerging markets this paper proposes that we see it as a constitutive feature of markets at the 'bottom of the pyramid'.

Network marketing and state legitimacy in China: Regulating trust from physical workplaces to virtual spaces

“…Meili's situation was intimately connected with unfolding state policies that aim to measure and rate the credibility and trust of citizens and corporations in China, increasingly being tied together through the emerging "social credit system" (shehui xinyong xiti) (Ahmed 2019;Creemers 2018;Hoffman 2017;Kostka 2019). On one hand, her husband's need to go undercover resulted from the 2013 Supreme Court decision that legitimized the blacklisting of debtors through blocking their personal ID numbers, thereby removing access to basic services, including transport, accommodation, and travel, until the debts were repaid (Yang 2017).…”

“…In many parts of the world, network marketing conforms to a neoliberal agenda of subject making through entrepreneurship and cosmopolitanism that both shape and frustrate aspirations of middle‐class consumption (Cahn 2006, 2008; Casanova 2011; Dolan and Rajak 2016; Droney 2016). By contrast to the neoliberal development model of “corporate social responsibility” and finding fortune at the “bottom of the pyramid” (Cross 2019; Dolan and Johnstone‐Louis 2011; Street and Cross 2009), the Chinese state actively intervenes in network marketing with the aim of securing economic order and bolstering political legitimacy, as well as fostering capitalist growth. Building on studies of network marketing that emphasize the importance of popular finance and the circulation of money in aspirations for success (Krige 2012; Musaraj 2011; Schiffauer 2019), this study contributes to the consideration of the verticality and scales of these contemporary economic activities beyond a homogenizing trope of neoliberal globalization (see Nonini 2008).…”

Introduction

“…The critical investigation of solar has benefited from the work of a number of the contributors to this issue, including Daniel Barber, Amanda Boetzkes, Jamie Cross, and Gökçe Gunel. See Barber 2016;Boetzkes 2017;Cross 2019aCross , 2019band Gunel 2019. See also Cross, Mulvaney, and Brown 2020;and Mulvaney 2018. 3 Speaking with respect to the specific import of Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (2011) to energy theory, the editors write: "we cannot fully account for the production and consumption of oil without reckoning with the strategic, political, economic and social forces implicated by, and implicated in, the transition from coal to oil" (Van Veelen 2019: 2).…”

The solar good: energy ethics in poor markets

“…Salespeople reassert and entrench these socioeconomic differences by asserting their superior, expert knowledge of technology, and by drawing on local idioms of language, style, and dress to make a sale. As they do so, selling solar re‐inscribes forms of class inequality and vernacular caste prejudice into the market economy (Cross ).…”