In recent years, business has reimagined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a proactive market strategy, aligning itself with development orthodoxies of pro-poor and inclusive growth by enrolling the un- and underemployed into new regimes of entrepreneurial labour. Here, we examine this incarnation of “capitalism qua development”, through ethnographic case studies of market inclusion initiatives in Kenya – one spearheaded by a transnational corporation seeking to empower women through entrepreneurship, the other by a social enterprise recruiting street youth to sell commodities at the BoP (bottom of the pyramid). Moving beyond inclusion as a proxy for accumulation, we explore what is produced, obscured, and foreclosed in this iteration of the CSR-development nexus; and trace how entrepreneurial inclusion seeds new values and imagined futures, while recasting resilience as moral virtue and precarity as personal failure. In attending to the everyday labour of becoming an entrepreneur, we argue that these initiatives constitute technologies of rule, folding the logics of capital into spaces of selfhood, aspiration, and social belonging.
Dolan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.