Rethinking rural entrepreneurship in the era of globalization: some observations from Iran

Abstract

This longitudinal qualitative study aimed at investigating and analyzing rural entrepreneurship in the era of globalization. The main goal of this paper is to form and present a theoretical alternative for mainstream economic rural entrepreneurship. For this purpose, 40 entrepreneurs, experts, and practitioners in the agricultural and rural sector were specifically selected and textual data analysis was done by content analysis method using a strategy of theoretical coding (open and axial). The interviews have been done in two time periods from 2015 to 2018 in four Iran provinces. The results show that it is possible to separate four distinct types of rural entrepreneurship in Iran: (1) the orthodox globalized economic rural entrepreneurship, which is based on the productivist approach and economic development in agriculture; (2) the globalized technological rural entrepreneurship with the aim of the commercialization of agriculture through heavy using of technology; (3) the globalized applied scientific rural entrepreneurship with the emphasis on the applied literature in the history of development; and finally (4) the (rural) entrepreneurship as a supplementary of (rural) development, which tries to go beyond the dichotomies like rural-urban, and the mainstream entrepreneurialism. The main suggestion of the research is the so-called "Anti-globalized Cultural Rural Entrepreneurship" that is a constructed rural entrepreneurship, and actually a process aiming to shift and transform the rural entrepreneurship discourse to the multifunctional agriculture and social movement domain.

Rural Entrepreneurship: An Analysis of Current and Emerging Issues from the Sustainable Livelihood Framework

“…At the sustainability node, the analysis reveals that goals, such as the alleviation of poverty (Humberg and Braun 2014), or even its eradication (Sati and Juyal 2008), literacy improvement (Singh et al 2012), inequalities reduction (Falk et al 2009), critical natural capital conservation (Shahraki and Heydari 2019), income and food security, employment and rural-urban migration (Igwe et al 2020), and the improvement of livelihoods (Muhamad et al 2017), require the intervention of governments that should assume a reform approach and a revolutionary approach to change its structure (Sutter et al 2019). As a summary, Figure 2 shows the relationships between rural entrepreneurship and sustainable livelihoods from the sustainable development and sustainability nodes.…”

“…Thus, the ecological sense of rural entrepreneurship must not be neglected if it is expected to support sustainable development. Research lines on preservation and regeneration of critical natural capital would become relevant to enrich the discussion, offer insights to alleviate poverty in the long term (Shahraki and Heydari 2019), and preserve natural resources depleted or endangered resources.…”

Three-Dimensional Paradigm of Rural Prosperity: A Feast of Rural Embodiment, Post-Neoliberalism, and Sustainability

“…Reviewing rural entrepreneurship and its involvement within political and economic struggles requires adopting new attitudes toward the body and embodiment and understanding that the body is both a medium to express the tendencies and attitudes of society and a creative and vibrant source of new perceptions. If we accept that rural entrepreneurship is closely associated with multi-functional agriculture [28], then the transformation of entrepreneurship into multi-functional agriculture requires fundamental changes in bodily perceptions intertwined with masculinity and heterosexuality and the affirmation of a kind of bodily comfort, rather than pressure on the body by a tough man. Here, we discuss embodiment, or real bodies [29].…”

Emprendimiento rural como estrategia de innovación inclusiva

“…Es así que, Soleymani et al (2021) manifiestan que los emprendimientos rurales buscan asegurar el valor agregado de los activos rurales en las áreas rurales mediante la participación de los recursos humanos locales. Pero no solo queda ahí, si no que el problema es esencialmente un desarrollo desigual, que es la progresión de una región a expensas de otras, acompañado de cuestiones relacionadas con el desarrollo (Shahraki y Heydari, 2019;Wenqi y Wenbin, 2023).…”