Rural Entrepreneurship as a Context: Research in the Psychology of Economics and Development

The aim of this paper is to analyze the sociological context of rural entrepreneurship in Iran. By setting 20 semi-structured interviews with twenty entrepreneurship experts and entrepreneurs, and using ATLAS.ti software for analyzing the transcripts, we shed new light on the entrepreneurship as a contextual phenomenon. From theoretical stance, the research based on the social constructionist theories like Gidden’s Structuration Theory, Karl Polanyi’s moral economy and also Arturo Escobar’s post-development notion. We begin from the rethinking of August Comte’s and Joseph Schumpeter’s thoughts and emphasize the factors like discourse, agency, morality, social capital, and nature. The paper is classified in the frame of economic sociology as an academic discipline. Our main argument is that first of all, it is necessary to see rural entrepreneurship as a discourse, and then, economic discourse of rural entrepreneurship should be replaced by the sociological discourse of multi-functional agriculture. Considering and analyzing the rural entrepreneurship as a developmental discourse, intervening the moral elements like preferring the societal interests to individual ones, the sentiment affairs, and naturalism, and finally seeing the multi-functional agriculture as a complementary rural development discourse, are the three main recommendations of this study.