Abstract:
Western knowledge rejection at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) costs the development sector an estimated US$152 billion every year in unused knowledge and hence lost potential productivity. During the past six decades, the development sector has been transferring knowledge on modern productive processes to help lift BoP communities out of poverty. Yet, most of the new knowledge transferred to these communities has been rejected. Knowledge rejection has not received focused and in-depth examination. The very few studies that have directly analysed knowledge rejection have done so only briefly, and are confined to the context of commercially oriented multinational corporations, mainly in the context of developed countries. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by a detailed analysis of knowledge rejection in the unexplored context of the development sector and BoP communities. Using secondary data and textual analyses based on four cases of knowledge transfer at the BoP, I find that the very nature of, and approaches to transferring Western knowledge threatens the basis of BoP communities’ social identity, thus causing them to reject this knowledge. I argue that the transfer of Western development knowledge to the BoP is not a socially neutral process – it is bound up with the social identities of the participants in that process, and a disregard of the identities of the intended knowledge receivers at the BoP causes Western knowledge rejection. I make the case for the development sector in the West to view BoP knowledge transfer in a more nuanced manner that takes into account the social identities of the intended knowledge receivers. My study makes two contributions to the literature. First, I examine knowledge rejection through the framework of the interaction between two factors, namely a one-way knowledge transfer approach and a lack of expertise in the transfer of knowledge on the part of Western experts, both are factors which have so far been disregarded in the BoP context. My analysis offers a comprehensive interrogation of the phenomenon by developing a new conceptual model of knowledge rejection at the BoP. Second, I suggest that a failure in knowledge transfer is not caused by lack of absorptive capacity on the part of the knowledge receivers but that the failure is actually caused by a lack of absorptive capacity on the part of Western trainers operating at the BoP. This thesis underscores the significance of identity issues and the relational, social dimension of the knowledge transfer process by arguing that in West-BoP knowledge transfer, it’s not what you know, it’s about who you are.