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Introduction
A rich literature largely of research in developed economies has focussed on entrepreneurship from a macro perspective (Audretsch and Thurik, 2001). Simultaneously, indigenous entrepreneurship has received increasing academic attention in terms of economic development in developed countries, i.e., the Fourth World defined as, “those native peoples whose lands and cultures have been engulfed by the nations of the First, Second and Third Worlds” (Graburn, 1981, p. 61); this has been the focus of a growing literature (Dana, 1995, 2015; Dana and Light, 2011; Peredo et al., 2004). Fourth World theory (Seton, 1999) focusses on the depressed existence of indigenous nations largely in modern, developed countries (Dana and Anderson, 2007).
In developing countries too, indigenous people face similar struggles: around 62 per cent of the population of Pakistan (i.e. approximately 115 million people) live in rural areas (World Bank, 2015) with poor socioeconomic conditions. Pakistan ranks 147th out of 188 countries on the United Nations Development Programme’s 2015 Human Development Index – a comparative measure of life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living for countries worldwide (Human Development Report, 2015). Urban migration further aggravates the socioeconomic situation in already poor rural areas, as many educated and skilled workers migrate in pursuit of employment.
Academic interest in entrepreneurship in developing countries has mainly concentrated on mostly urban, small-scale industries (Coad and Tamvada, 2012) and microenterprises (Jones et al., 2014). However, entrepreneurship in rural areas of developing economies does not reflect that of urban areas. Sindh, Pakistan, is one such example as those who would like to be more entrepreneurial are restricted in doing so by cultural, socioeconomic, religious and structural factors.
About two-thirds of the population of the Indian sub-continent: Bangladesh, India and Pakistan reside in rural areas, directly or indirectly associated with income from an agricultural-based economy. However, there is little empirical research that informs understanding of indigenous entrepreneurship and business development in rural settings of agricultural-based economies. There is a lack of understanding at a very micro level of what other phenomena, along with some obvious socioeconomic conditions, inhibits the rural population of these agricultural-based economies from engaging in entrepreneurship. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to contribute to the gap of understanding the context of rural entrepreneurs in agricultural-based...