From the Theorists of Agricultural Enterprise to Professionals of Agricultural Entrepreneurship

The work aims to contribute to reopening the debate on the theoretical framework of the agricultural enterprise, necessary for a broader conceptual understanding of entrepreneurship in the agricultural sector. Agreeing with the observation that agricultural enterprises today find themselves operating in a more complex environment defined by the ecological transition and that university research must take up the challenge, the study seeks to draw insights from the theoretical contributions of some theorists of Italian agricultural economics and from the international scientific literature on the topic of the agricultural entrepreneurship. To achieve this goal, two choices were made: nationally, reference was made to the 1979–2008 period marked by the contributions of Michele De Benedictis and Vito Saccomandi; internationally, reference was made to two literature reviews on the topic of research on “agricultural entrepreneurship,” the former published in 2017 in the journal Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and the latter in 2019 in the Journal of Rural Studies. The results suggest the need to build a new agricultural enterprise theory useful as a background for business studies in light of the approach outlined by theorists of agricultural economics. This is especially true during this historical phase in which the priority of the ecological transition draws attention back to the main role played by agricultural enterprises in the process of change in the sector.