Peasantry and Entrepreneurship As Frames for Farming: Reflections on Farmers' Values and Agricultural Policy Discourses

This article takes a frame analytic approach to the popular peasantentrepreneur typology and focuses on the much-studied topic of farmers' values. Peasantry is often thought to represent traditional or indigenous style of farming, while entrepreneurship is associated with values injected and promoted by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In this article, peasantry and entrepreneurship are approached as frames for farming, i.e., social constructions that can be used to make sense of farming. The aim is to study whether farmers themselves frame farming in line with the peasant ethos and whether one can detect the impact of the policy discourses in farmers' framings. The study utilises value survey data from Finland and concludes that even though Finnish farmers' framings do not straightforwardly reflect the peasantentrepreneur typology, they are highly compatible with the multifunctionality policy discourse. The results call for further attention to the novel framings new peasantry and ecological entrepreneurship that are compatible with the multifunctionality discourse.