Playing with fire: an MNC’s inability to translate its market logic in a culturally complex exchange setting in rural India

Kay, E

Thesis

Playing with fire: an MNC’s inability to translate its market logic in a culturally complex exchange setting in rural India

Abstract:: This dissertation describes the manner by which a multinational corporation (MNC) enacts a market-based logic with a locally embedded partner in a complex and unfamiliar operating setting to fulfil both business and social objectives. It examines a hybrid partnership between BP, an MNC, and SSP, a rural Indian non-governmental organisation (NGO). Together, the organisations trained rural women, who were affiliated with SSP, as agents to distribute and sell BP’s ‘smokeless’ cookstoves and fuel pellets to households who cook on smoky firewood stoves. The research draws on two theories—neo-institutional organizational theory and real markets theory—to examine the process by which logics are aligned across partners and projected and translated into the rural Indian exchange setting. It constructs a four-actor model (MNC, NGO, agent, customer) to explore the exchange relationships between the actors at the meso- and micro-levels. At the meso-level, it explains how the MNC and NGO’s non-aligned logics, asymmetric power dynamics, and lack of mutual trust contribute to the venture’s failure. In addition, the NGO was so determined to succeed as a professional, market-driven, channel partner that it shed part of its identity as a civil advocacy organisation and adopted mainstream commercial practices that were not sensitive to the needs of its local stakeholders. At the micro-level, the partners did not come to a common understanding with the agents regarding the cultural challenges they faced marketing the stove. Moreover, the marketing strategy glossed over the multi-layered social relationships and culinary, behavioural, and religious practices that needed to be translated for the technology to meet the needs of consumers. Using gritty ethnographic data, the dissertation highlights a challenge that large, foreign companies face when entering ‘Base of the Pyramid’ markets, namely the inconsistency between the MNC’s market logic and the wider associational logics that motivate village agents and customers.

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APA Style

Kay, E. (2012). Playing with fire: an MNC’s inability to translate its market logic in a culturally complex exchange setting in rural India [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Kay, E. Playing with Fire: an MNC’s Inability to Translate Its Market Logic in a Culturally Complex Exchange Setting in Rural India. University of Oxford, 2012.

Chicago Style

Kay, E. 2012. “Playing with Fire: an MNC’s Inability to Translate Its Market Logic in a Culturally Complex Exchange Setting in Rural India.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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