Entrepreneurial sons, patriarchy and the Colonels’ experiment in Thessaly, rural Greece

Abstract

Existing studies within the field of institutional entrepreneurship explore how entrepreneurs influence change in economic institutions. This paper turns the attention of scholarly inquiry on the antecedents of deinstitutionalization and more specifically, the influence of entrepreneurship in shaping social institutions such as patriarchy. The paper draws from the findings of ethnographic work in two Greek lowland village communities during the military Dictatorship (1967–1974). Paradoxically this era associated with the spread of mechanization, cheap credit, revaluation of labour and clear means-ends relations, signalled entrepreneurial sons’ individuated dissent and activism who were now able to question the Patriarch's authority, recognize opportunities and act as unintentional agents of deinstitutionalization. A ‘different’ model of institutional change is presented here, where politics intersects with entrepreneurs, in changing social institutions. This model discusses the external drivers of institutional atrophy and how handling dissensus (and its varieties over historical time) is instrumental in enabling institutional entrepreneurship.

Keywords:

• institutional entrepreneurship
• patriarchy
• family farming
• peripherality
• rural change

Notes

1. According to Casson (1982, 24), judgemental decisions are instances where ‘different individuals, sharing the same objective, and acting under similar circumstances would act differently on account of different access to information or different interpretation of it’.

2. Four property groups were identified: upper range-sized landholdings (20–120 ha), middle range landholdings (8–19 ha), lower middle range landholdings (4–7 ha) and small landholdings (1–3 ha).

3. All real names were replaced with fictional, ghost names, for reasons of anonymity/confidentiality.

4. Term first used by Sahlins (1972) to characterise economies organised by domestic groups and kinship relations, in which production for use rather than exchange prevails and it is directed towards the household's internal requirements.

5. The Greek Communist Party was legalized by the Act of 23 September 1974.

6. Land redistribution occurred in Zobas in 1966 and in Kotsari in 1972 as the state response to land fragmentation, a villager recalls: ‘before the land redistribution, I had 33 pieces in Kotsari, and I had to keep notes so I won’t forget to sow some of them. Today I only have one piece of land of 12.5 ha’.

7. As Stark (2009, 7) points out about the polysemic character of the term worth, ‘rather than the static fixtures of value and values, it focuses instead on ongoing processes of valuation’.

8. According to Leca and Naccache (2006, 632), ‘institutional logics are frameworks that incorporate the assumptions, beliefs, and rules through which individuals organize time and space, and which give meaning to their social reality’.