Rural entrepreneurship: a historical approach

Abstract

This work shows the historical evolution of the role of the rural entrepreneur, the roles assumed according to the changes of context over time and new conceptualizations around rural entrepreneurship that should no longer be seen only as linked to the agricultural function, but to the territory, which gives room for other types of non-agricultural enterprises to be cemented in rurality and be considered as rural entrepreneurship. This work was carried out thanks to an in-depth exploration and subsequent collection of bibliography from databases in the period from 1756 to 2018, defining a search equation that allowed finding 5220 documents and after a refinement and the use of the bibliographic manager Mendeley®, a total of 443 documents remained, which were processed, read and categorized in a bibliographic matrix. As a result, a conceptual evolution of the role of the entrepreneur is observed, characterized by several roles and descriptions, as well as of rural entrepreneurship, which is seen as the creation of a company in a rural environment and where it no longer depends only on the agricultural function, which opens the way for the development of other types of non-agricultural businesses in the territory, bringing with it a new approach to explore in the literature on entrepreneurship.