New Entrant Farmers in the Context of the Greek Debt Crisis: Identifying Antecedents and Outcomes of the Underlying Entrepreneurial Learning Process

The focus group of this thesis are the crisis-led new entrant farmers in Greece. In other words, the cohorts of Greek people who, seeking a refugee from the debt-crisis ravaging the country or/and recognising a window for opportunity in agriculture, get involved into farming by establishing their own farm ventures without having a relevant prior professional experience with agriculture. 

Due to the economic and productive restructuring of agriculture new entrant farmers are encouraged to see themselves as entrepreneurs identifying and pursuing business opportunities. Thus, they increasingly require agricultural entrepreneurship and the subsequent entrepreneurial behaviour, which are the outcome of an underlying learning process​. 

This learning process , in terms of influencing factors, learning related activities and outcomes, is what I examined by conducting 18 semi-structured interviews with new entrant farmers,  applying the critical incidents technique and based on the 3-P model of workplace learning.