What

This page is the home of the working manuscript entitled "The promise of rural entrepreneurship and sustainability management as a unified domain for scholarly study and practice," by Craig E. Armstrong and Josie A. Burks and presented at the US Association of Entrepreneurship and Small Business (USASBE) special conference on rural entrepreneurship at the University of Vermont on June 17-19, 2024.

The Poster

USASBE Conference Paper

The promise of rural entrepreneurship and sustainability management as a unified domain for scholarly study and practice

Rural regions, known in the U.S. as rural America, make up about 97% of the U.S.'s land area, and around 17.9% of the nation’s population (American Progress, 2019). As more of the U.S. population moved from rural / non-metropolitan communities to metropolitan and suburban communities over the past 50 years, rural areas began to see an increase in persistent poverty, housing insecurity, unemployment levels, and inadequate medical services. These rural land areas are sources of crucial environmental resources of water, food, energy, and recreation for all Americans, yet seem to be uniquely lacking in other resources most Americans take for granted. 

One important thread seems to run through the narratives of all the rural communities that have fallen on harder economic times: the absence of attractive entrepreneurial opportunities. Most notably, we see this perceived chronic absence of opportunities affect where the children of rural communities elect to live their adult lives. Opportunities for young people to find mates, start promising careers that help them build wealth, buy homes that will increase in market value, and start families all seem to exist in metropolitan, suburban, and nonrural areas. According to NYU Stern marketing professor Scott Galloway, author of the NY Times bestselling “Algebra of Happiness" (Galloway, 2019), “Credentials + Zip Code = Money,” and more generally, “opportunity is a function of density.” In other words, young people have the best chance of maximizing their earning potential over their careers and the best chance of meeting someone who will make a suitable lifetime partner when they move to the big city. 

The scholarly pursuit of entrepreneurship as a research domain was arguably unfocused until we reconceived the domain as the nexus of an enterprising individual and a promising opportunity (Venkatraman, 1997; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). The entrepreneur-opportunity nexus framework led scholars away from equilibrium approaches to new ways to explain entrepreneurial behavior and processes (e.g., Davidsson, 2015; Shane, 2003). We once viewed entrepreneurs as individuals who possessed certain unique traits (e.g., Gartner, 1988). Once we began to realize we were asking the wrong questions about the phenomenon, we were better able as scholars to make progress in advancing the domain as one worthy of academic inquiry (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000). 

This proposed paper is a “taking stock” of the opportunities posed by combining the still comparatively nascent literatures on rural entrepreneurship and sustainability / climate change. Many rural communities already feel the burden of being left behind in the 21st century economy. Many rural communities also are now suffering from aging or non-existent infrastructure, potential environmental hazards from long-abandoned mining or manufacturing operations, and few of the institutions for organizing local economies that large urban counterparts enjoy. The human capital, natural capital, and entrepreneurial opportunities between rural entrepreneurship and sustainable development are quite similar, while policies that address both areas remain poorly translated into practice (Steiner & Teasdale, 2019). We propose that our discoveries in these domains might occur more frequently and with more impact if we view them together. We believe our proposed model holds promise for realizing this combination because we intend to build upon and recombine existing frameworks to find new approaches to discovery and policy advice.

There are some classic frameworks from entrepreneurship that are useful for framing and understanding sustainability, and there are also some classic or emerging frameworks from sustainability that can be used to frame and understand rural entrepreneurship. Both domains invoke people, the environmental context, institutions, and economic contexts for framing their major constructs / actors. And some go beyond static (though useful) hierarchical or relational models to include process components. Entrepreneurship and sustainability are, after all, deeply process-oriented. For example, the Moore (1986) framework is a multi-stage model that identifies three main stages of innovation, implementation, and growth, each of which has inputs from the individual, environmental, innovational, and organizational levels (see Figure 1). We believe rural entrepreneurship has the best potential to have its value unlocked (Steiner & Teasdale, 2019) both in research and in practice through a coupling with sustainability management. 

Sustainability Management Framework

Sustainable development calls for us to reduce the impacts our human actions have on the global climate and, in particular, on the ability of our planet to meet current human development goals while also enabling natural systems to serve the needs of future generations of humans (UN General Assembly, 1987). That UN General Assembly report, referred to as Our Common Future, established a set of common concerns posed by the increasing severity and frequency of environmental disasters like the African famines, nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, and massive release of pesticides from Union Carbide’s Bhopal, India, facility to formulate a “global agenda for change” (UN General Assembly, 1987: Chairman’s Foreword). These mandates ultimately led to the creation of, among several, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were adopted by all member states of the United Nations in 2015 to end poverty, reduce inequality, and build more peaceful prosperous societies by 2030 (UN Environmental Program, 2023). These SDGs represent an organizing framework for the national level for achieving sustainable development goals. Similarly, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) provides a membership platform for global corporations to participate in working toward solutions to climate change, climate decarbonization, 

Like entrepreneurship, sustainability management is a global phenomenon. Yet its pursuits will be just as diverse as the different types of people, nations, levels of economic development, and resource distributions across the planet. Many of our prescriptions for practice in entrepreneurship remain under explored within the different national and regional economic settings, just as our prescriptions for sustainability practice differ along the same dimensions. The general frameworks we use to present our ideas in entrepreneurship and sustainability management tend to be abstract enough to ensure their generalizability without being specific enough across different contexts to make substantial progress within any single context. 

Rural Entrepreneurship

In our thinking about entrepreneurship in rural communities, we agree with Steiner and Teasdale (2019) that (1) rural entrepreneurship, especially social approaches to entrepreneurship in rural communities, could represent a means of tackling rural challenges of providing sustainable economic development, addressing the withdrawal of public services and promoting community cohesion; (2) that such social enterprises can potentially enable an integrated approach to addressing local issues at the local level; and (3), and perhaps most importantly, that rural entrepreneurship might best proceed as moderated growth rather than through exponential disruptive growth; the last thing we as rural entrepreneurship scholars would want to see would be the wealth individuals from “stuck” over expensive urban communities appropriate the value created by rural entrepreneurs in their communities and properties. Rural entrepreneurship will redefine what the idea of “scaling up” means. 

The way we believe their ideas can find the fulness of their promise is through enterprises that address so-called Triple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1997) challenges of economic, social, and environmental domains that characterize sustainable development and sustainability management. We see opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural settings finding ways to lead their communities into participation in circular economies that allow product makers, especially those of large-scale, capital intensive products, to keep those products and the value built into them in productive economic use. We see opportunities for entrepreneurs in rural settings to test and develop solutions for water, soil, groundwater, and air quality management and for energy production. 

Without prescribing any particular means of organizing rural communities, we are intrigued by the return to the City-State model of ancient Greece in which cities provided a common location for sharing ideas in the arts, culture, science, and philosophy. In our modern model, rural communities share resources across a constellation of rural municipalities anchored by a larger, somewhat more municipal hub that serves not as the source of innovations, but as an exchange for the best practices and ventures to be shared and realized. But we need to explore with different levels of analysis (individual, environment, organization, community, nation, region) and different lenses of analysis that perhaps only a sustainability lens can provide. 

Reconceiving Models of the Entrepreneurial Process as Models of Sustainable Social and Economic Progress

Carol Moore’s (1986) model of the entrepreneurial process is a natural place to start with the manipulation of lenses and levels of analysis. As we observed above, Moore considered three different stages of the entrepreneurial process and the inputs provided from different levels of analysis. We explore one of those stages - innovation - and some of the inputs to that stage that might be considered in this proposed research agenda. 

Moore’s (1986) process model stage for innovation includes personal and environmental inputs covering what appear to be mostly “state” types of conditions that make innovation necessary. Personal characteristics include creativity, information seeking behavior, and a tolerance for ambiguity. The environment offers sources of opportunity, support for creativity, and a culture that emphasizes the importance and contributions of the individual. Both of these sets of characteristics have remained consistent across numerous models of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., Timmons 1999) and more specifically in models of the opportunity discovery process (e.g., Ardichvili & Cardozo, 2000; Ardichvili, Cardozo, & Ray, 2003; Baron, 2006; Baron & Ensley, 2006). The innovation stage of entrepreneurship is largely a function of the person who views trends and changes in the external environment through individually-unique lenses that depend on the individual’s education, experience, and creativity. Those attributes of education, experience, and creativity are made possible by role models, parents, and the value communities place on those attributes. 

When we apply those models to rural communities it becomes quickly apparent that if those communities do not have the resources and vision to provide those experiences to their citizens, then it should not be surprising that little innovation occurs in those communities. Further, the lack of cultural sensitivity and belonging and lack of locally-specific knowledge make it further unlikely that an outsider might be able to discover opportunities in those communities. 

In order to produce larger populations of rural entrepreneurs, we need to focus on developing the education and skills of community residents to increase their abilities to engage in entrepreneurial pursuits and / or be employed by and lead supporting institutions. Rural communities have decades of experience teaching students using traditional approaches of K-12 education; the most gifted students often receive scholarships or other attractive offers to attend secondary schools (universities or service academies) that take them away from their communities initially for four years and ultimately for the entirety of their productive professional careers. Students with promising career opportunities will tend to follow the money into larger, more urban settings to pursue higher salaries in jobs that reward and make the best use of their talents and education. 

Strategies to recruit and retain professionals for underserved areas such as rural communities have already had mixed results in attracting. In the case of the need for rural medical doctors, only 9 percent of physicians practice in rural areas even though roughly 20 percent of the U.S.  population live in those areas (e.g., Geyman, Hart, Norris, Coombs, & Lishner, 2008). rural areas  talent from other areas, even other countries to fill much-needed professions. The community medical doctor role, for example, used to be based on government-funded scholarships for medical students who couldn’t otherwise afford medical school; in exchange, these students would serve rural communities for a set period of time to pay back the government for their educational fees. Yet these programs have not produced the desired outcomes of long-term primary care physicians remaining in the service of these communities. The same can be said for entrepreneurs who feel the need to leave home to seek richer opportunities and more supportive institutions in larger municipalities. Rather than view this situation as an insurmountable problem, we view it as an opportunity to look at human capital development in rural communities through different lenses at multiple levels of analysis. 

Conclusion

It is not our intention to criticize the burgeoning literatures on rural entrepreneurship or sustainability management. Instead, we propose that our discoveries in these domains might occur more frequently and with more impact if we view them together. We believe our proposed model holds promise for realizing this combination because we intend to build upon and recombine existing frameworks to find new approaches to discovery and policy advice.

References

American Progress. 2019, July 17. Redefining Rural America. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/redefining-rural-america/.

Ardichvili, A., & Cardozo, R. N. 2000. A model of the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition process. Journal of Enterprising Culture, 8(2): 103–119.

Ardichvili, A., Cardozo, R. N., & Ray, S. 2003. A theory of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development. Journal of Business Venturing, 18(1): 105–123.

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Geyman, J. P., Hart, L. G., Norris, T. E., Coombs, J. B., & Lishner, D. M. 2000. Educating Generalist Physicians for Rural Practice: How Are We Doing? The Journal of Rural Health, 16(1): 56–80.

Moore, C. F. 1986. Understanding Entrepreneurial Behavior: A Definition and Model. Academy of Management Proceedings, 1986: 66–70. Presented at the Academy of Management annual conference, Academy of Management.

Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. 2000. The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1): 217–226.

Steiner, A., & Teasdale, S. 2019. Unlocking the potential of rural social enterprise. Journal of Rural Studies, 70: 144–154.

UN Environment Programme. 2024, February 6. UNEP Annual Report for 2023. UNEP Annual Report. http://www.unep.org/annualreport/2023.

United Nations General Assembly. 1987. Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future.

Venkataraman S. 1997. The distinctive domain of entrepreneurship research: An editor's perspective. In J. Katz & R. Brockhaus (Eds.), Advances in entrepreneurship, firm emergence, and growth, vol. 3: 119–138. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Figure 1