In this article, we develop theoretical and empirical linkages between corporate social responsibility initiatives of business organizations and their market development efforts at the bottom of the pyramid. We use qualitative in-depth interviews of 21 CSR heads of business organizations and its CSR partner organizations in India to explore, develop, and explain plausible theoretical linkages between CSR initiatives of the organizations and its market development efforts at BOP using theory of market separations. Using theoretical frameworks from CSR literature and sub-theory (...) of market separations from marketing literature, the study suggests that market development at BOP is enhanced using the CSR route in several ways. These are, making the BOP market development less risky, mask the CSR initiative as a BOP pilot project to generate internal traction within the organization, integrating the BOP communities with the last mile of the supply chain of the organization, bringing government intervention to accelerate scale-up, and developing BOP as future markets for consumers and supply chain partners to make business more sustainable. Our study has several theoretical as well as managerial implications linking organizations’ market development efforts at BOP with its CSR initiatives. (shrink)

Charles Darwin remarked that “males, with their superior strength, pugnacity, armaments, unwieldly passion and love songs, are almost always the more active and most often, the initiators of sexual interactions”.1 Here, we propose that such male sex drive directly impacts the genome by leading to its progressive masculinization—genes that possess sex-specific effects on male fitness accumulate to a much greater extent and are generally more diverged.2,3 The larger proportion of male versus female fitness modifiers in combination with stronger sexual selection (...) may generate evolutionary signatures such as a greater sensitivity to male sterility4 and a paucity of X-linked male-specific genes.5-8 Male sex-drive theory complements the female-choice theory of sexual selection and allows for the genetic variation of costly sexual traits to be continuously replenished. BioEssays 27: 518–525, 2005. © 2005 Wiley periodicals, Inc. (shrink)