Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid

Abstract

Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities – the practices, technologies, and representations of time – which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums: from the invocation of clock-time discipline to the professional time of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the enchantments of the not-yet. But the appeal of BoP, we suggest, does not turn either on the here-and-now of survival or on an impossible pipe dream of prosperity, but rather resides firmly in the medium term: a foreseeable future of modest desires, which nonetheless remain tantalizingly just out of reach for most. By examining how these temporal conflicts play out in attempts to fashion a cadre of self-willed, aspiring entrepreneurs, we reveal the limits to entrepreneurial agency, and the contradictions inherent in the mission of (self-)empowerment through enterprise upon which the ideology of inclusive markets is built.