Young women farm heads in Greek agriculture: entering farming through policy incentives
Abstract This work examines the entry of young Greek women into farming as heads of farmholdings under the relevant EU and national framework of incentives. The work is based on the analysis of available secondary information and mail-survey data secured from a sample of 128 young women established in farming during the period 1991–2000 in the region of Thessaly, Central Greece. Their responses to the system of incentives are examined initially as a whole group and then separately by focusing on two typological polar opposites, that is those women that are entering farming as a lifestyle and those entering for reasons of necessity. There is documentation of young women farmers’ use of the incentives and benefits derived there from and their assumption of a certain share in the decision-making power vis-a-vis their farmholding, the last-mentioned especially when the two typological groups are considered.
Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels’ experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece
Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch's authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship.
Farming Women: Gender, Work and Family Enterprise
Part 1 Feminism and family enterprise: women and farming concepts and themes, structure of the book. Part 2 Family farming: a challenge to theory external constraints, internal resilience recent developments. Part 3 A feminist reconstruction: the elusive family beyond the unity of capital and labour patriarchal gender relations reproduction as labour process the conjugal household domestic political economy. Part 4 Theory into practise: making women's work count macro and micro analysis, fieldwork and methods study areas farm typology survey of farm wives case studies. Part5 5 Women's work and property: life-cycle or patriarchy? gender divisions of family labour domestic household work agricultural work other kinds of work patriarchal labour relations gender divisions of land and capital decision-making and renumeration patterns and problems. Part 6 "Being the farmer's wife": ideology and the labour process family ties and working life the working day women's work contrasting ideologies of wifehood farming women incorporated wives processes and problems. Prt 7 The domestic political economy of six family farms: two faces of family farming the Greens at Holly farm the Churches at Naylors farm the family farm in transition the Prices at Fountain farm the Browns at Castleton family farming under strain the Watsons at Vale farm the Evans at Rough farm. Part 8 Conclusions: rethinking family farming the labour process commoditisation and differentiation shifting perspectives gender, class and livelihood.