Peasantry and Entrepreneurship As Frames for Farming: Reflections on Farmers' Values and Agricultural Policy Discourses

Abstract

This article takes a frame analytic approach to the popular peasant-entrepreneur typology and focuses on the much-studied topic of farmers' values. Peasantry is often thought to represent traditional or 'indigenous' style of farming, while entrepreneurship is associated with values injected and promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In this article, peasantry and entrepreneurship are approached as frames for farming, i.e., social constructions that can be used to make sense of farming. The aim is to study whether farmers themselves frame farming in line with the peasant ethos and whether one can detect the impact of the policy discourses in farmers' framings. The study utilises value survey data from Finland and concludes that even though Finnish farmers' framings do not straightforwardly reflect the peasant-entrepreneur typology, they are highly compatible with the multifunctionality policy discourse. © 2012 The Authors. Sociologia Ruralis © 2012 European Society for Rural Sociology.