What Can Participant Observations Tell Us About Rural Entrepreneurship?

In the last 20 years, rural entrepreneurship has emerged as a distinct area of analysis within scholarship on entrepreneurship. The emergence of rural entrepreneurship as a cohesive area is evidenced, among other things, by the publication of this book and the associated rural entrepreneurship conference, recently held in Glasgow and Leeds! Yet – curiously – the relationship between ‘the rural’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ has been less studied through participant observations. Participant observations constitute ‘collecting data in situ and in vivo, capturing thoughts, actions and interactions between people as they unfold naturally in real life’ (Zilber, 2020, p. 6; see also Giazitzoglu, 2018; Giazitzoglu & Payne, 2018). In the context of rural entrepreneurship scholarship, this means – more specifically – a researcher entering a rural context and watching and recording how entrepreneurship unfolds in that rural context through the interactions, behaviours and choices of entrepreneurs embedded in the rural. Participant observations allow particularly detailed empirical insights to emerge into the lived, experiential and subjective aspects of rural entrepreneurship.