Caste, Exclusion, and Humiliation in Indian Markets: Moving Beyond the Bottom of the Pyramid Paradigm

Recent inclusion-oriented approaches in business and management studies, such as bottom-of-the-pyramid and subsistence marketplace, aim to alleviate poverty but often overlook the socio-historic realities of marginalized groups. These approaches frequently depoliticize inequality by failing to adequately engage with ascriptive hierarchies, such as caste, which shape access to resources, opportunities, recognition, and dignity. We address this gap by advancing the Bottom of the Caste Pyramid (BOCP) as a relational and processual lens to examine how caste structures market participation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 31 BOCP participants, our analysis reveals graded ascription of status, systemic misrecognition, and problematic inclusion as mechanisms of exclusion and humiliation faced by them, alongside their context-specific agentic responses to sustain market participation in the form of valorization, oscillating between erasures, calculated survival, and normalization of inequality. These practices enable survival yet maintain caste-based hierarchies through ongoing negotiation. By foregrounding caste as a foundational principle organizing market relations, the study calls for historically anchored, dignity-centered approaches to inclusion in management scholarship.