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This chapter aims to explore the means by which rural food business networks can contribute to sustainable rural development.

This chapter explores the role of rural food business networks in sustainable rural development. This is conducted initially through a literature review. This is followed by presentation of case studies of two Irish rural food business networks; a discussion of the evident rural development brought about by the actions and activities of these networks; and an exploration of some of the factors that influence the capacity of the networks to bring about rural development.

This chapter presents evidence that demonstrates the important contribution rural business networks can make to rural development. It also finds that factors such as autonomy, embeddedness and place can influence the effectiveness of a network in bringing about and sustaining rural development.

Despite several interesting findings emerging from this research, the level to which these findings can be generalised is limited. Future research of aspects of network operation such as access to infrastructure and services would assist in ascertaining the importance of place for rural business networks and their ability to bring about rural development.

Given the significant role that networks now play in the rural development strategies of place-based organisations, this chapter has important implications for how those organisations initiate and structure those networks.

This chapter can serve as an encouragement to rural entrepreneurs to engage in networking activities to reduce rural isolation, create stronger links with their consumers and to sustain their businesses.

The focus of this chapter on factors such as embeddedness, autonomy and place and their impact on rural business networks, provides a rare opportunity to the reader to appreciate the influence of these factors on networks and their capacity to bring about and sustain rural development.

The creation of small businesses in Mexico since 1990, largely the result of the diversification of activities in rural areas, is one of the most prominent strategies, both for the improvement of the quality of place and life and for value of localized resources. Although the rural context imposes barriers, social capital and networks constitute an advantage for rural entrepreneurship, since shared values and norms such as the local context allow the articulation of economic, productive, social, and cultural resources for production and sale of significant goods for the region. The cases analyzed show the value of the collective dimension for the start of productive projects, which have contributed to reconverting and sometimes reconfiguring old resources such as land, ecosystems, landscape, animals, and crafts, in assets to start a business.

It is important that agency advice and support for SMEs in rural areas is congruent with how business-owners perceive their needs and challenges. To explore how well matched these two sides are, this chapter investigates the difficulties faced by small businesses operating in rural southwest Scotland.

In-depth interviews with business influencers (those whose activities affect businesses either through application of policy initiatives, development of policy or the giving of business advice) and owner-managers of rural businesses compare and contrast the perceptions of the challenges of rurality for small businesses.

Mismatches are revealed between the concerns of rural business-owners and what business influencers understand them to be. Business influencers consider that structural weaknesses and a ‘lifestyle’ business culture in the region inhibit growth, but business owners are strategic in their business aspirations and approaches to growth. However, they are also highly critical of the promotion of the region and concerned about the misunderstanding of potential visitors that the region is remote and difficult to access.

This chapter reports experiences in a particular rural location; such experiences are typical of many rural regions and, thus, the findings should be transferable.

The region’s economic strategy focuses on reducing the significant prosperity gap with the rest of the country. Key to this is the development of indigenous business sectors. However, the policy interventions derived from a misapprehension of the constraints and underpinning culture of indigenous businesses are unlikely to be successful and may be counter-productive.

Contrasting the perspectives of those who do business with those who influence business reveals issues of understanding which need to be addressed.

This paper examines the development of Internet‐based, virtual business forums and their potential for overcoming some of the difficulties faced by business owners in rural areas. Rural environments provide challenges for business owners due to limited local markets and limited access to resources. The paper examines the success of collective action by business owners in rural environments in Scotland to establish Internet‐based business forums that seek to meet such challenges. Using case study methodology, the paper finds variable experiences and proposes a model of the process of collective action.

This paper reports on the quintessential rural small firm, the tourist service provider and explores the impact of the recent foot and mouth outbreak. A theoretical framework is employed which proposes that many rural small firms capture and commodify the values that are inherent in the countryside. Part of this process is the portrayal of image and is an essential element of the new economy of signs and symbols. This image was critically challenged during the outbreak and thus affords us a unique opportunity to examine what happens, the impacts and effects, on small rural business when the image is tarnished. The findings show that small firms in rural areas suffered badly, even in areas where there was no disease. This leads one to argue that the effects of the disease were generated, less by fact, and more by the production of image. However, it was also found that rural small firms were extremely flexible in their responses to the crisis. In turn this seems to suggest that many small rural businesses may have a particular resilience which augurs well for sustainability.

Informal associations are typical features of farm and non-farm ventures especially within rural communities. Owing to the informality of these associations, members of the groups usually evolve strategies to cope with different kinds of economic and social shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic or unexpected economic recessions. Accordingly, entrepreneurship and non-farm business development in rural areas require massive finance input, which this group largely lacks owing to agrarian activities which is the main source of revenue. Therefore, to inform rural development policies, this chapter draws on the interrelationships that exist between finance options (including formal, informal and social networks) and small business development. Using the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Survey – Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA), the analytics identifies informal financing and social networks as leading alternatives to formal financing option in rural businesses. Therefore, we suggest that the government institutions recognise and formalise informal finance systems. This will not only aid access to government interventions and programmes, but foster collaborations with existing formal institutions and investors for sustainable rural business financing.

Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

This study aims to explore the social networks and network interactions of bed-and-breakfast (B&B) entrepreneurs in rural China. In addition, it evaluates how such network interactions relate to rural resilience.

In-depth interviews were performed in two locations: Ningbo and Dujiangyan, China. Purposive sampling was combined with snowball sampling to select interviewees. The 154 interviews involved 29 B&B owners and relevant social actors. All codes and data were analyzed using the discourse analysis framework.

The B&B owners’ social networks were identified based on strategic goals, revealing a business operation network, business development network and business citizenship network. Challenges in seeking financial support for rural B&Bs during the pandemic were specified along with network interactions. The institutional adaptation approach was used to evaluate network interaction in rural B&B business. It was argued that other networks would react based on primary network members’ goal compatibility and the effectiveness of the primary network in addressing obstacles.

This study indicates that the rural B&B entrepreneurs’ interactions with various networks could influence on business resilience, community resilience as well as rural resilience.

By combining the institutional adaptation typology with social network theory, this study generates a new typology of network interactions for rural B&Bs. The typology helps to explain how and why B&B entrepreneurs make decisions and provides a broader scope of social networks involved in these business operations.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of the gender dynamic in rural areas by investigating the motives of women who join their family firm (or their spouse's family firm) and thereby defy the demographic trend of rural flight. The context of this study is the depopulation of rural areas with the closing of basic services and relocation of the younger population, and educated women in particular, to urban areas. Consequently, rural family businesses risk failing to find successors and suffering forced closure or relocation. The empirical site of the study is rural family firms in Sweden, a context characterized by a high level of gender equality in legislation and culture but gender-conservative business structures in rural regions.

The empirical case in this paper builds on a qualitative study of nine (9) life course narratives of women entrepreneurs in a rural region of Southern Sweden who have returned to rural areas to join their family business. The authors follow the view established by gender scholars that women are active agents in navigating their lives, and their life story narratives offer insight into the considerations that inform their choice to stay or return to rural locations. In Sweden, the setting for the study, gender equality is widely supported by legislation, policy and institutional frameworks and popular understanding of gender relations. In contrast to the gender-progressive policies of Sweden at large, women's entrepreneurship in rural regions of Sweden tends to follow traditional gender hierarchies and face similar constraints as in rural areas of other countries. The juxtaposition of these competing sets of ideals makes Sweden an important and interesting place to study and draw insights from the experiences of women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal that women who choose to join rural family firms view them primarily in a positive light and see this choice as aligned with their need for professional flexibility and assertiveness, rewarding relationships, and a calm, secure, well-balanced life. Theoretically, the study implies that women choosing to engage in rural family firms seek non-material benefits, such as work–life balance and social support, and may be driven in part by a sense of psychological ownership that extends to the rural community.

The findings provide novel insights on women as active agents in navigating their lives and the intrinsic (e.g. alignment of personal values) and extrinsic (e.g. community support) motives that inform their decisions. The study also raises questions regarding how women perceive themselves as “fitting in” to rural settings and to what extent the sense of security within these settings that the women describe may be contingent upon factors such as their families' embeddedness within the community as well as their conformity to the local social norms.

The objective of this research was to identify organizational strategies used by rural retailers to balance conflicting demands of social norms and business performance standards to achieve success.

In‐depth interviews with 12 community leaders and nine locally owned retailers in eight resilient rural communities in six different US states were conducted.

The data suggest that operational strategies of local retailers in rural communities follow internal and external scripts and specific scripts are associated with decoupling and/or recoupling strategies and business survival. Decoupling occurs with internal scripts relating to business strategy and external scripts relating to community involvement and customer value. Recoupling was evident with internal scripts related to business strategy, attitude toward future business growth and attitude toward planning and survival; it was also evident with external scripts relating to community change and the local economy.

Future research should include the development of an instrument to assess a larger sample of rural retailers to determine if the findings of this study are consistent with other retailers. This would lead to the need to develop education materials to help rural retailers improve their survival and continuance.

Rural retailers need to improve their survival and continuance by building reciprocal relationships with the community and consumers, and can do so by seeking training to improve these marketing strategies.

The current research uniquely examines rural retailer ability to balance conflicting norms of the social and task environments and the impact it has on retailer success.