Markets at the Bottom of the Pyramid and the Politics of Valuation

International audienceThis paper explores the development of a new doctrine that is the " Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid " in both the market sphere and the field of the politics of development (international organization). In this new model, free enterprise, private investment and more fundamentally markets, are strongly upheld as the potential driving force in the fight against poverty in Southern countries. Market expansion is thought as a momentum to include the poorest in society through a logic of economic and financial "inclusion" (Budinich, Reott, & Schmidt, 2007). The paper is developed as follows : firstly, we come back to the doctrine of BoP Markets to examine how it emerges from and gives rise to an institutional work sustaining its circulation from the Business Schools to the MNC (MultiNational Companies) and even to the International Organizations involved in economic development. Then, we analyse how this managerial doctrine defends a re-ordering of economic values in order to resolve the dissonance between market and poverty. Finally, we examine how it performs the practices of Western MNC and generates a set of experiments around BoP products and markets which convey new political and moral properties