Abstract
There is an emergent wave of multinational corporations (MNCs) entering low-income markets in developing countries (London and Hart 2004; Hart 2005; Prahalad 2005). Notable examples of MNCs entering low-income African markets are Ericsson, Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), Tetra Pak and The Dow Chemical Company. MNCs often enter these markets with the dual goal of gaining legitimacy and achieving growth (cf. Hart and Christensen 2002). In terms of legitimacy, MNCs strive to act as good ‘corporate citizens’ and to improve their legitimacy in the eyes of their most influential stakeholders in mainly the US and Europe.1 Thus, MNCs’ operations in low-income African markets become part of the trend of increased corporate emphasis on corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Waddock et al. 2002). In addition to legitimacy, MNCs enter low-income markets in an effort to overcome the slow growth characterising the middle-and high- 1 In this chapter, ‘corporate citizenship’ is defined from an empirical perspective (cf. Rowley and Berman 2000; Egels 2005). Hence, the values that MNCs further both rhetorically and in practice comprising ‘corporate citizenship’, and ‘good corporate citizens’ should be understood as a striving to improve legitimacy by furthering certain sets of values. © 2006 TaylorXX1Francis.