Development and its Evil Twin: The Situational Analysis of Rural Entrepreneurship in Sistan Region

This is the first endeavor for applying the Situational Analysis (SA) as a recent methodology in a scientific inquiry about the rural entrepreneurship, a current development and policymaking strategy through the country. After presenting an introductory discussion related to the development, entrepreneurship, discourse, and also about the political economy of entrepreneurship, the situational analysis continues through designing the two (messy and ordered) situational and social arena maps. The paper gains from a cartographic sampling method that is based on two above-mentioned maps. Twenty rural entrepreneurs in Sistan region, three formal documents, and three websites of rural organizations have been selected for setting the semi-structured and post-modern-informed interviews. The social arena map that is the backbone of this study has been designed draw on the open coding of the transcripts, extracting the co-occurrence table, and the families via ATLAS.ti software. Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory has been used through the situational analysis and its corresponding discourse analysis. According to the findings, there are three distinct rural entrepreneurship discourses of "the governmental rural entrepreneurship discourse", "the rural entrepreneurship system and job-making discourse", and "sense-making rural discourse" within the overall rural entrepreneurship discourse in Sistan. These entire three discourses encounter with the specific counterpart discourses that will be articulated around the empty signifies. Finally, the study believes that with an optimistic view, the rural entrepreneurship discourse in Sistan is little more than a semi-capitalist development strategy, and through a pessimistic way of seeing, is just an obstacle of rural development process.