Rural Development
Seyed Ahmad Firouzabadi; Hossein Imani Jajarmi; Hamideh Dabbaghi
Abstract
Nowadays, social entrepreneurship in the form of different organizational structures (profit, non-profit, or combination, charities, cooperatives, joint-stock companies, businesses, unions) creates social value. The cooperatives play an expanding role in the society and the number of women as their ...
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Nowadays, social entrepreneurship in the form of different organizational structures (profit, non-profit, or combination, charities, cooperatives, joint-stock companies, businesses, unions) creates social value. The cooperatives play an expanding role in the society and the number of women as their member is increasing. This research is to investigate whether rural women's cooperatives in Iran, considering they are a combination of both private and public sectors, can be a platform for social entrepreneurship. We have analyzed eight interviews rural women as members of a rural women's cooperative and the text of law about cooperative companies. Moreover, we have applied grounded theory as our method and the MAX QDA as a software to analyze qualitative data. The results of this research show that 438 semantic terms were extracted and categorized into 5 categories of clusters, 16 main themes, and 42 sub-themes. During the establishment of a cooperative in 2011, there have been two kinds of capital-financial facilities, human capital and knowledge. The nature of the created business in the cooperative has addressed rural women as the community and their problems as social problems. Analysis of the social problems shows that this cooperative has initially intended to create job for the entrepreneurs and secondly to solve the local economic problems of women, especially those as the head of the household. The Entrepreneurship Environment in the rural women's cooperatives (Mehr Afarin Eram) consists of four main factors: entrepreneurs, rural women as local community, special aspects in social, cultural, economic and legal contexts, as well as the obstacles against the cooperatives. Strategies of these cooperatives are formed via current strategies like training part, human resource management, financial, production and sales as well as development strategies in the future. Additionally, the achievements and outcomes of the cooperatives shows that Mehr Afarin Eram can empower women, create objective and subjective values, and achieve financial success.
