From Arturo Escobar's development theory to Antony Giddens’s structuration theory: a social constructionist analysis of rural entrepreneurship and multifunctional agriculture

摘要

Many research papers in the field of entrepreneurship have gained from a positivistic analytical approach, both in epistemology and methodology. Also there are very limited enquires concerning entrepreneurship in rural areas, or rural entrepreneurshipin a new way. Through this paper, using social constructionism as a big paradigm, Antony Giddens^s Structuration Theory and Arturo Escobar's Three Component Theory in development deployment, we try to present an explanation of rural entrepreneurship andmultifunctional agriculture, as two main discourses in rural regions. The main claim is that it is necessary to shift from positivistic and hegemonic discourse of rural entrepreneurship to socially constructed discourse of agriculture's multifunctionality, through an analytical reversion of Escobar's theory, and using Structuration Theory as a theoretical context.