Too old to rush, too young to wait: Rural older entrepreneurial behaviour from the perspective of socio-biophysical economics

The paper explores the behaviour of rural older entrepreneurs by examining their social identities in the biophysical rural context. Taking a grounded, socio-biophysical approach to older entrepreneurship, the article examines the social and biophysical contexts of older rural entrepreneurship. The research builds on a set of 20 semi-structured interviews with older rural entrepreneurs from Greece (high-income country) and Serbia (middle-income country). The research presents a grounded, multi-level theory of older rural entrepreneurship in the middle-income and high-income economies, where the biophysical layer imprints on the social layer. It contributes to older entrepreneurship and rural entrepreneurship research by showing the relevance of the social and biophysical contexts of entrepreneurship, thereby going beyond economic and profit-oriented explanations of entrepreneurship. This has implications for how we construct and define entrepreneurship in older generational cohorts and in different rural contexts, and consequently for entrepreneurial policy design in the ageing society.