The rural socio-sustainable entrepreneur: constructing and navigating context in Italy's Mezzogiorno

<p dir="ltr">This thesis examines how rural entrepreneurs in the southern Mezzogiorno region of Italy actively construct and navigate their complex socioeconomic context whilst seeking to ensure business sustainability and community survival. Notwithstanding decades of economic disparity between north and south and ongoing rural demographic decline, these entrepreneurs demonstrate remarkable capabilities for creating viable businesses while preserving community wellbeing in a context characterised by contracting demand, resource constraints, weak institutional support, limited infrastructure and brain drain, making traditional development approaches often inadequate.</p><p dir="ltr">This research employs phenomenographic analysis of interviews carried out with 24 rural entrepreneurs in combination with some 200 hours of field observations to identify the three key ways rural entrepreneurs navigate, engage with and build their surrounding context in Villaggio (a pseudonym) in the rural community of Basilicata. I conceptualise these individuals as guardians of community fortunes, extending their purpose beyond achieving individual success to preserve collective wellbeing. To do so, they navigate strategically between formal and informal economic structures, creating socially-legitimate operations that span both domains; and perform gender roles tactically, with female entrepreneurs developing both intramural and breaking free approaches to address differing gender expectations in domestic and business contexts. I bring these findings together in a model of the rural socio-sustainable entrepreneur (RSSE.) This captures how entrepreneurs simultaneously respond to and reshape their environment through five interconnected dimensions: active context creation and navigation; formal/informal economic navigation; gender performance and role navigation; resource optimization and network management; and community guardianship and resilience building. At the core, the RSSE emerges as a context creator and navigator focused on enhanced business and community sustainability. The research extends theoretical understanding of rural entrepreneurship by contributing to fourth wave contextualization theory, advancing institutional asymmetry frameworks, and applying gender performativity concepts to rural contexts in the Mezzogiorno, while offering valuable insights into sustainable development pathways for marginalized areas. These findings also have implications for policymakers seeking to develop more targeted and culturally-sensitive interventions in support of rural entrepreneurship in economically marginalized regions.</p>