Curtis, Sally Anne
Description
There are more than a billion people living in poverty throughout
the world, with some considering the total number to be as high
as four billion, or about half the world’s population. On the
face of it, poor people with limited funds would appear to be of
little interest to the private sector, yet there has been
increasing interest in the topic in recent years. This interest
is particularly concerned with achieving a win-win scenario where
both business and...[Show more] the poor benefit. Research involving the
business-poverty interface at the micro level has only really
started to emerge in the past decade and is disparate, and
theoretical development is lacking. Furthermore, there has been
limited empirical research that examines this phenomenon from the
perspective of the firm and the poor. This thesis includes three
papers that address these issues.
Paper 1 presents a detailed review of relevant literature and
proposes a definition of inclusive business that involves the
private sector expanding access to livelihood opportunities and
products and services in commercially viable ways. I argue that
inclusive business is both normative and instrumental, meaning
that integrative management is critical to achieve benefits for
both the firm and the poor. The paper presents a conceptual
framework of inclusive business that explains why and how firms
adopt inclusive business. The framework incorporates the role of
formal and informal institutions, which play a critical role in
both enabling and constraining inclusive business efforts.
Paper 2 presents the results of an empirical study that examines
the firm’s experience of inclusive business using Scott’s
(2008) pillars of institutions. I conducted an in-depth study of
five firms involved with inclusive business in Vanuatu, an island
country in the Pacific with a complex institutional environment.
An analysis of interviews with managers demonstrates that formal
institutions (regulative) act as a catalyst to encourage firms to
interact with the poor, however weak formal institutions and
informal institutions (cultural characteristics and social norms)
inhibit a firm’s inclusive business efforts.
Paper 3, also an empirical study, examines the relationship
between inclusive business and poverty alleviation using Amartya
Sen’s capability approach. Through an analysis of interviews
with poor stakeholders of the five case study firms and
multidimensional poverty data for each stakeholder, the results
show the importance of an institutional environment that supports
inclusive business. Furthermore the results suggest an
association between capacity building and poverty alleviation.
Taken as a whole, this research program contributes to the
theoretical development of the business-poverty interface by
developing the concept of inclusive business and presenting a
framework supported by empirical evidence for understanding the
constraints, mechanisms and outcomes of inclusive business. The
research also contributes to institutional theory by examining
interactions between institutions and providing evidence that
informal institutions are prominent in the study context. The
results also contribute to research on institutional change and
points to the potential for firms to influence the institutional
environment, in contrast to other institutional research that
tends to examine how institutions shape firm behaviour.
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