Representations of Executives on Rural Markets

Abstract

Rural market as a construct has been widely debated, viewed from multiple dimensions and operationalized in more than one way. However, such operationalization of the construct has been a work of academics trying to manipulate the social world drawn from several theories with significant rigour. The earlier operationalizations had very little flavour of the practitioner’s angle. Unless the practitioners’ viewpoints are embedded into the operationalization; the relevance of defining rural markets would be incomplete. In this paper, we attempt to address this concern by considering the way executives represent the rural markets in their daily lives. We developed a scale using the social representations approach and sought responses from over 200 executives. Out of the cluster solutions we received from the executive representations, we observed that there were several overlaps of what rural markets are among the different executives. This article is a preliminary attempt to understand rural markets and serves the purpose for taking up more related studies in future.