Farming beyond food : Effect of embeddedness and governance structures on farmers’ role in rural development

This article contributes to the debate on entrepreneurs’ role in societies as well as the consequences of rural embeddedness and engagement, or the role of farmers in rural development and entrepreneurship. A contextualized view of farmers embedded—both spatially and positionally— in the entrepreneurial ecosystems is applied. The study, based on interviews with 24 farmers, 6 observations, and 8 interviews with actors within the agricultural support system, uses the Gioia methodology for analysis, thus enabling inductive theorizing. We find that farmers’ multifunctional role and their impact on societal development are central to understanding farmers’ entrepreneurial endeavours as well as their engagement in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Hence, this article discusses farmers’ embeddedness in rural society and development processes. It highlights the multifunctional role of farmers in society, which we argue make them enablers for rural development, an important role that has been overlooked in both entrepreneurship research and policy work.Funding: The Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry, and the Foundation CR Prytz donation