‘They're Going to Have to Start Becoming’: What Inclusive Capitalism Tells Us About the Changing Face of Development

Dolan, Catherine; Rajak, Dinah

Abstract

In recent years, business has reimagined corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a proactive market strategy, aligning itself with contemporary development orthodoxies of pro-poor and inclusive growth by enrolling the un- and under-employed into new regimes of finance, consumption, and entrepreneurial labour. This paper examines this latest incarnation of ‘capitalism qua development’, where market inclusion promises new possibilities for an ‘enterprising’ citizenry in the Global South. 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)—we examine what is produced, obscured, and foreclosed in this iteration of the CSR-development nexus. Moving beyond inclusion as a proxy for material accumulation, we trace how entrepreneurial inclusion unfolds ethnographically, seeding 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 the spaces of selfhood, aspiration, and social belonging.

Citation

Dolan, C., & Rajak, D. (in press). ‘They're Going to Have to Start Becoming’: What Inclusive Capitalism Tells Us About the Changing Face of Development. Anthropologie et développement,

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 2, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jul 8, 2025
• Print ISSN: 2276-2019
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed