CSR Evangelism: Rural Consumers Walk down the Road to Enlightenment

This paper critically analyzes the corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourse as operative within a fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) organization, operating in the health food sector. The dominant CSR discourse propagated as a means of mutual value creation for the organization and also the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) is questioned. Consumer freedom at the BOP seems an elitist privilege for subaltern consumers, as corporate initiatives to do good get innocuously mired with divergent discourses of brands, consumer culture, power and politics. The study draws on empirical evidence from qualitative interpretive research, based on semi-structured interviews document analyses and participant observation. Data was analyzed using grounded theory method and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).