Rural women in local agrofood production: Between entrepreneurial initiatives and family strategies. A case study in Greece

Abstract

Recent years have seen a relative flourishing in the Greek countryside of small women’s businesses engaged in the production of local traditional agrofood products for an emerging consumer demand for foods of specific quality. In the present article the central research question may be summarized as: “to what extent do these women perceive their business more as a means of supplementing family income than as a point of departure for a personal professional career?” We argue that women as entrepreneurs probably adhere to different behavioural patterns from men and have different expectations in the sense that they attach more importance to maintaining equilibrium between the requirements of profession and the demands of family life than they do to achieving economically rational goals through business success. The findings of the empirical research carried out in the Peloponnese (2006–2007) indicated that these were small individual businesses utilizing local resources (farm production, traditional recipes, family labour). The women started up their businesses making use of tacit knowledge and know-how, with the small and flexible scale of the production and the family character of the business minimizing entrepreneurial risk. These are dynamic and often innovative businesses with a capacity to adapt to the demands of the consumer market.