Exploring territorial embeddedness in rural entrepreneurship: a case-study in a remote rural area of Italy

Entrepreneurship has become a key success factor for rural businesses. This paper puts forwards the distinction between rural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship in the rural and deals with definition and measurement of entrepreneurial anchoring in rural contexts, by focusing on different dimensions of territorial embeddedness. More precisely, the paper aims at testing eventual links between levels of embeddedness and the entrepreneurial profile of farmers. Three-fold embeddedness is individuated: Societal embeddedness, Network embeddedness and Territorial embeddedness. Area under study is localised in central Italy, in an extremely rural context marked by depopulation processes and marginalisation of economic activities. Through the help of a questionnaires submitted to a sample of farmers, a cluster analysis has been carried out with the purpose of aggregating homogeneous farms in relation to their rural embeddedness. Results evidence a diversified set of embeddedness to which different degree of entrepreneurial orientation and performance are linked.