Mechanism And Empirical Studies Of Peasants’ Entrepreneurship In Agriculture

Peasant entrepreneurship is considered as the effective way to solve the issues concerned with "agriculture, rural area and farmer" under current economical and social development, which plays an important role in pushing forward the rural community construction, accelerating the agricultural modernization, relieving farmer’s employment difficulties and advancing the sustainable increase of farmer’s income. Therefore, both the theoretical cycle and the political cycle pay the extensive attentions and lay great emphasis on peasant entrepreneurship. Central government repeatedly stresses that the driving of peasant employment and entrepreneurship is a strategic and all-round cause in our modernization construction process. At the same time, many domestic experts and scholars in different fields also join in the peasant entrepreneurship research team in succession, thus creating abundant research results concerned.While recognizing the abundant achievements of research on the domestic peasant entrepreneurship, we need to observe the phenomenon attaching importance on non-agricultural entrepreneurship and ignoring agricultural non-agricultural entrepreneurship in the current researches of peasant entrepreneurship. As the non-agricultural entrepreneurship of peasants which concerns the development process of urbanization and industrialization, the entrepreneurial activities of all the peasants have the same indispensable strategic power to accelerate realizing the target of agricultural modernization in China. Nevertheless, what is the incongruent between the flourishing agricultural entrepreneurship practice and the great attention paid by the policy circle in the vast land of China is that the attention paid on this by the field of peasant agricultural entrepreneurship research is still not enough. And there is the lack of specialized research achievements of systematic analysis on the mechanism of peasant agricultural entrepreneurship. Thus, it is attempted to apply the mainstream entrepreneurship theory to have a tentative exploration on the agricultural entrepreneurial behaviors and process of peasant group so as to make up the blank space in the research related to some extent.By virtue of the entrepreneurial process theory, four key actions are investigated in the initial stage of agricultural entrepreneurship in this article, that’s to say, generate the agricultural entrepreneurial intention, distinguish agricultural entrepreneurial opportunity, obtain the initial agricultural entrepreneurship resource and form the preliminary performance of agricultural entrepreneurship. Along with the logical venation of the key actions mentioned above, the thinking and the key points of agricultural entrepreneurship mechanism lie in the answers to the below questions: What factors can influence the agricultural entrepreneurial intention of peasants? How is the mechanism of peasants distinguishing agricultural entrepreneurial opportunity? How is the efficiency of peasants obtaining initial agricultural entrepreneurship resource? What are the dominant factors that influence the preliminary performance of agricultural entrepreneurial project? With the first-hand data that are acquired through field investigation, some meticulous discussions are made concerning these questions in this article. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) The influence factor of peasants generating the agricultural entrepreneurial intention and non-agricultural entrepreneurial intention is different, which mainly influenced by degree of education, previous entrepreneurial experience, available amount of land for family, parents’entrepreneurship status, friends and relatives support and numbers of relatives and friends who are village cadres. In the meantime, the policy of external environment perceived by peasants, market and loosening degree of social and cultural environment have certain effect on generating the agricultural entrepreneurial intention.(2) Among the peasant groups who are not entrepreneurs, peasants with entrepreneurial intention can be considered as potential peasant entrepreneurs. While among potential peasant entrepreneurs, those peasants who have agricultural entrepreneurial intention, once had entrepreneurial experience or working experience of marketing, or have higher entrepreneurial alertness and lower density of entrepreneurship discussion network will have more possibility to recognize agricultural entrepreneurial opportunity.(3) After making comparative analysis based on different industries, entrepreneurial organization form and agricultural industry segmentation towards gaining scale and method of preliminary funds, labor force and technological resources of peasant entrepreneurs, it found that peasants have higher self-sufficiency level at the time of gaining entrepreneurial preliminary resource. The result of empirical analysis focusing on gaining status of preliminary resource of peasant agricultural entrepreneurship has verified the positive influence of self-sufficiency level of preliminary resource on gaining efficiency of resource, and found the magnitude of this degree of influence depends on peasant entrepreneurs’previous entrepreneurial experience and numbers of relatives and friends who are in office in financial organizations as well.(4) This paper has studied preliminary performance of project of agricultural entrepreneurship from the dimension of survival performance, and the result shows that working experience of management, density of discussion network, numbers of relatives and friends who are civil servants and gaining efficiency of preliminary resource has prominent influence on the initial survival performance of peasant agricultural entrepreneurship. Specifically, those peasants of agricultural entrepreneurship who have working experience of management, lower density of entrepreneurial discussion, larger number of relatives and friends who are civil servants and higher gaining efficiency of preliminary resource,their entrepreneurial projects are more likely to achieve good survival performance.In general, this paper better combines theory with solid evidence, having verified explanatory power of main-stream theory of entrepreneurship towards peasant agricultural entrepreneurial behavior and process through the first-hand investigation data and preliminarily drawn the line of internal mechanism of preliminary activity of peasant agricultural entrepreneurship. This paper may have some contributions to the research field of peasant entrepreneurship in following aspects:first, this paper differs from many former researches in this field, it uses peasant agricultural entrepreneurial activity as subject of the study. Obviously, this will help us more completely understand the similarities and differences of mechanism of peasant entrepreneurial behavior in different industrial background. Second, this paper breaks through many former peasant entrepreneurial study that only conducts simple thinking of analysis of whether peasants start a business or whether they have entrepreneurial intention, constructs conceptual framework that covers several key entrepreneurial behaviors of peasant entrepreneurial study with entrepreneurial process theory and makes further analysis of a series of behaviors behind peasant agricultural entrepreneurial selection based on this.