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Articles

Unnoticed Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Latvia’s Rural Economy

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the constructive and detailed feedback given by Guntra Aistara, Dace Dzenovska and the two anonymous referees who reviewed this manuscript for Journal of Baltic Studies.

Notes

1. The website of European Network for Rural Development. Accessed 3 August 2012. http://enrd.ec.europa.eu/themes/entrepreneurship/rural-entrepreneurship-gateway/en/rural-entrepreneurship-gateway_en.cfm.

2. The estimated number of small farms in Latvia is about 79,000, of medium-sized farms approximately 5000 (Tamuļeviča Citation2012).

3. A more comprehensive depiction of life and work on smallholdings in Latvia has been presented in a monograph (Cimdiņa and Raubiško Citation2012b).

4. “Innovation is a process whereby the new ideas, developments and technologies in scientific, technical, social, cultural or any other area are materialised in a competitive product or service which has a market demand” (EM 2003, 4).

5. Other publications on this research: Cimdiņa (Citation2011), Cimdiņa and Raubiško (Citation2012a), Cimdiņa and Raubiško (Citation2012b).

6. The name of the bath-house master is anonymized.

7. Historically in Latvian farmsteads, the bath-house has been a place for the farmers to wash themselves after hard work using various herbal whisks; the bath-house was not intended for the provision of a paid bath service to others.

8. Interview with the bath-house master Jānis recorded at his farm, 11 March 2010. All subsequent quotes from Jānis in this section are from the same interview.

9. Latvia’s national currency.

10. The work of Schumpeter referred to in this article as (Schumpeter Citation2000) is the second chapter of the The Theory of Economic Development (1934) – the translated version of the second German edition. The typology of entrepreneurial behaviors Schumpeter offers is: (1) the introduction of a new good, (2) the introduction of a new method of production, (3) the opening of a new market, (4) the conquest of a new sort of supply of a raw material, (5) the creation of a new organization on an industry (Schumpeter Citation2000, 51).

11. Conversation with the bath-house master Jānis recorded at his farm, 26 March 2010.

12. CitationIndriķa Hronika [Chronicle of Indrikis] 1993. Translated by Ābrams Feldhūns. Rīga: Zinātne.

13. In the works by Anna Brigadere, Ilze Indrāne, Harijs Gulbis, Vladimirs Kaijaks, Kārlis Ieviņš, Kārlis Skalbe, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš among others.

14. Conversation with the bath-house master Jānis recorded at his farm, 26 March 2010.

15. During the year, 284 villages were struck off the register in Latvia. Diena.lv. 19.4.2012. Accessed 5 June 2012. http://www.diena.lv/latvija/gada-laika-latvija-likvideti-284-ciemi-13942801; http://www.tm.gov.lv/lv/jaunumi/pi_info.html?news_id=4150.

16. Conversation with a regional rural development consultant at his office, 20 August 2012.

17. Conversation with the bath-house master Jānis recorded at his bath-house, 4 August 2012.

18. Conversation with the bath-house master Jānis recorded at his bath-house, 4August 2012.

19. The flower business in the final decades of the Soviet era was a well-known source of money-making; when independence was won back, inherited lands were recovered by many Latvians to use them for agricultural purposes; together with the development of a market economy many cooperatives were organized; as borders could be freely crossed many an adventurer travelled to Germany to trade with machines; and today the bath-house farm has swept all over rural Latvia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agnese Cimdiņa

Agnese Cimdiņa holds a PhD and Masters’ degree in Social Anthropology from the University of Bergen, Norway. She currently works as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Latvia, Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology. Her main research interests: economic and business anthropology, development anthropology.

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