The seventh and last chapter of the book is a more substantial and summarized presentation of the new proposed relationship between the rural and the entrepreneurial. This leads to an indication of potential lines along which it may be feasible to fulfill the compelling challenge to develop new sets of specific developmental notions for future rural development. The most important finding of this chapter belongs to the illustrated electromagnetic role of development agencies, which are considered to be the linking pin of the new proposed rural-entrepreneurial relationship. Radical changes in economic development have always involved the perception of new orders and attention to the development of new rural ways of using entrepreneurship that are appropriate to the development of such order. The author dedicates this chapter to a discussion of certain features of both rural and entrepreneurial aspects of economic development that can help provide some insight into what is meant by perception and communication of a new sustainable rural order.
TopIntroduction
In this chapter, we wish to develop the relationship between rural entrepreneurship and rural development agencies more thoroughly, in order to show the great potentiality of the latter. We shall then be led to the conclusion that the new developmental paradigm can be demonstrated through an institutional evolution (North, 1991, p.97) both qualitatively (Hegel, 2010) and quantitatively (Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944). We systematically develop an ontology that is consistent with both rural (Aggarwal, 2018; Boyer & Ahn, 1991; Chambers, 1983; Horlings & Marsden, 2012) and entrepreneurship (Hisrich & Peters, 2002; Gibb, 1989; Drucker, 1985; FAO/Petrin, 1994) theories. We start with a knowledge-based enterprise and rural ontology which are defined models that organize structured and unstructured data through entities, their properties, and the way they relate to one another. This concept is based on the general systems theory (Boulding, 1956; Smuts, 1927; von Bertalanffy, 1968), in which interacting components are approached in an interdisciplinary way. Smuts’ ideas are summarized in Box 1.
Box 1. The origins and Smuts’ initial use of the term holism
| This character of “wholeness” meets us everywhere and points to something fundamental in the universe. Holism (from ολόs=whole) is the term here coined for this fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe. Its character is both general and specific or concrete, and it satisfies our double requirement for a natural-evolutionary starting point. Wholes are not mere artificial constructions of thought; they actually exist; they point to something real in the universe and Holism is a real operative factor, a Vera Causa. There is behind Evolution no mere vague creative impulse or Élan Vital, but something quite definite and specific in its operation and thus productive of the real concrete character of the cosmic Evolution. The idea of wholes and wholeness should therefore not be confined to the biologic domain; it covers both inorganic substances and mental structures as well as the highest manifestations of the human spirit. Taking a plant or an animal as a type of a whole, we notice the fundamental holistic characters as a unity of parts which is so close and intense as to be more than a sum of its parts; which not only gives a particular conformation or structure to the parts but so relates and determines them in their synthesis that their functions are altered; the synthesis affects and determines the parts so that they function toward the “whole”; and the whole and parts therefore reciprocally influence and determine each other and appear more or less to merge their individual characters: the whole is in the parts, and the parts are in the whole, and this synthesis of the whole and parts is reflected in the holistic character of the functions of the parts as well as of the whole. |
Source: Smuts, 1927, p.88
Logical self-consistency of inherent holism in relation to the main theme of our book is now illustrated by the author symbolically in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Maslow’s hierarchical pyramid with rural and entrepreneurial disciplines in relation to real empirical world and systemic disciplines