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The microfinance business model focuses largely on lending to the woman in the household, rather than the man. The belief is that women are more trustworthy borrowers than men, and that lending to women may have increased social impact. Yet in several cases, women do not have control over the loan backed business despite being the borrower of record. Such takeover of the business by the man constitutes an ethical violation. We find that high dependency ratios in the family are correlates of such ethical violations. Further, we also find that ethical violations have a significant economic cost, consistent with prior scholarship in the family-business domain. While access to microfinance increases household welfare, this beneficial impact reduces by over 50% in the presence of an ethical violation. Our results suggest that microfinance lenders need to move beyond the traditional role of just being a lender to providing advice on issues like family planning, and money management, and enforcement, thus moving closer to the solidarity economy paradigm of integrating savings and credit into broader canvases of social relationships and social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research posits that decision makers use specific cognitive frames to manage tensions in sustainability. However, we know less about how the cognitive frames of individuals at different levels in organization interact and what these interactions imply for managing sustainability tensions, such as in Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) projects. To address this omission, we ask do organizational and project leaders differ in their understanding of tensions in a BOP project, and if so, how? We answer this question by drawing on a 5-year study of a BOP project of a global pharmaceutical company in India. In line with the existing research, we found three kinds of frames—paradoxical, business case, and business—held differently across organizational levels and over time. We also found that the shift in frames of both project and organizational leaders was mediated by the decision-making horizon. The initial divergence across organizational levels, seen in paradoxical and business frames, was mediated by long-term decision-making horizon. However, there was an eventual convergence toward business frames associated with the shift from long- to shorter-term decision-making horizons and one that led to the project’s closure. We contribute by proposing a dynamic model of cognitive frames in sustainability, where the research has either alluded to top-down or bottom-up understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This brief perspective article presents and synthesizes few of the dominant themes emerging in the extant literature on BOP (bottom of the pyramid) marketing, in the backdrop of this special issue dedicated to 're-thinking marketing' in a fresh light. The article draws on how the extant understanding of poor customers pales in comparison to how much we know about non-poor customers. In the end the article proposes a brief wish list of few of the interesting research domains that can be taken up by emerging and new BOP scholars in the area of 'Poor Marketing'. Few interesting research questions include the following: (1) How poor consumers re-invent their new social image in the light of the constraints of the poor markets? (2) What role consumption plays to enhance the impact of pleasure on various aspects of the lives of the poor consumers? (3) How formation of communities helps the poor consumers to enhance the cooperation in resource-lean environments? (4) How social stratification (e.g., caste system in India) impacts social transformation of poor markets, and BOP market development? and (5) How BOP entrepreneurship impacts on social transformation at BOP? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gulf between multinational enterprises' focus on high income countries and the reality of 80% of the world living in developing, bottom of pyramid (Hahn, J Bus Ethics 84:313-324, ) economies could magnify the anti-globalisation movement and political backlashes in the twenty-first century. The global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 has increased such social tensions throughout the world and creates greater challenges for, responsible leadership. In this conceptual article, the authors analyse the value and identity of local managers, and the liability of foreignness caused by over-reliance on expatriate managers and under-reliance on local managers in bottom of pyramid countries (Hahn, ). It is argued that multinational enterprises need to assess local managers' knowledge and contributions as having not only operational and market value, but also institutional value, such as access to local knowledge and local social capital; such a holistic approach will ensure fairer, equal treatment of all managers in the multinational enterprise. Responsible leadership in the twenty-first century requires a greater appreciation of local managers' institutional value and the overcoming of any psychological distance towards local managers of bottom of pyramid countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A majority of the countries in the world are still considered “developing,” with a per capita income of less than U$1,000. Hahn (, Journal of Business Ethics 78, 711–721) recently proposed an ambitious business ethics research agenda for integrating the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” countries (Prahalad and Hart, , Strategy and Competition 20, 2–14) through sustainable development and corporate citizenship. Hahn’s work is among the growing field of research in comparative business ethics including the global business ethics index (Michalos, , Journal of Business Ethics 79(1), 9–19; Scholtens and Dam, , Journal of Business Ethics 75(3), 273–284; Tsalikis and Seaton, , Journal of Business Ethics 75(3), 229–238). This article is complementary to Hahn’s work and it advocates an urgent need for business ethics researchers to globally integrate the bottom-of-the-pyramid countries through a fundamental re-definition of the global economic triad, including the United States, Western Europe, and Japan [Ohmae, , Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition (New York: Free Press)]. The definition that we propose is based on business systems and institutional perspectives that include the bottom-of-the-pyramid countries. We also propose to broaden the research in business ethics to enable comparisons across business systems indifferent income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]