TITLE:
Rural Women Cooperatives at Greece: A Retrospective Study
AUTHORS:
Aikaterini Lassithiotaki, Argiro Roubakou
KEYWORDS:
Entrepreneurship of Rural Women; Rural Women’s Cooperatives; Greece
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Business and Management,
Vol.2 No.2,
April
30,
2014
ABSTRACT: This article investigates the basic entrepreneurship parameters of rural women’s cooperatives in Greece, such as cooperative culture, financial aid from European and national programmes, demographic characteristics of members, businesses characteristics of cooperatives, chair women’s self-assessment of participation in the rural women cooperatives and the educational and financial needs of the members and cooperatives respectively. The results of a quantitative study involving a sample of 49 (out of 140) Cooperatives of Greece identified that the entrepreneurship model of rural women’s cooperatives has problematic areas. Rural women do not evaluate, use and develop enterprise opportunities, nor adopt modern business methods. Rural women should change their attitude and their perception on issues of entrepreneurship and they should adopt another way of entrepreneurial behavior that would contain modern business methods.