Rural women in local agrofood production: Between entrepreneurial initiatives and family strategies. A case study in Greece

Recent years have seen a relative flourishing in the Greek countryside of small women’s businesses engaged in the production of local traditional agrofood products for an emerging consumer demand for foods of specific quality. In the present article the central research question may be summarized as: “to what extent do these women perceive their business more as a means of supplementing family income than as a point of departure for a personal professional career?” We argue that women as entrepreneurs probably adhere to different behavioural patterns from men and have different expectations in the sense that they attach more importance to maintaining equilibrium between the requirements of profession and the demands of family life than they do to achieving economically rational goals through business success.