Since 1980, poverty has been on the agenda of major international organizations (such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund). Narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas, eliminating extreme poverty, and achieving common prosperity are the ideals that human beings are constantly pursuing. In recent years, farmers have been forced to adapt to new challenges, such as market changes (Lans et al., 2013), information technology and biotechnology development, but rural poverty has not been adequately addressed (Rodriguez-Pose and Hardy, 2015). Poverty was initially considered to be an economic phenomenon, in which individuals or households were unable to meet basic living standards. Gradually, scholars have discovered that poverty is a multidimensional concept (Liu et al., 2017). Rural poverty is mainly discussed from three aspects of society, economy and ecology (Namara et al., 2010; Khan et al., 2014; Liu et al., 2017). Specifically, rural poverty issues include social exclusion, poor access to services and infrastructure, vulnerability to natural disasters, and an aging population caused by the migration of young people (Namara et al., 2010; Farmer et al., 2011; Alkire and Fang, 2019).

However, the actions of governments, commercial enterprises, and non-profit organizations often fail to effectively solve such problems (Ganapati and Reddick, 2018; Li et al., 2018); this has become known as a “triple failure” problem. Social entrepreneurship is an activity that maintains its operations by selling products or services in an innovative way, based on a clear social goal. It takes into account the efficiency, innovation and resources of business entrepreneurship, as well as the enthusiasm, values and mission of non-profit organizations, in order to provide innovative solutions for social poverty (Austin et al., 2006; Neck et al., 2009) and help communities meet complex social, economic and environmental challenges (Steiner and Teasdale, 2019).

To be sure, social entrepreneurship has a positive impact on rural issues (Steinerowski and Steinerowska-Streb, 2012), but few articles focus on its role in the rural context. Most of the existing studies focus on the definition, influencing factors, performance, legitimacy and other aspects of social entrepreneurship (Janssen et al., 2018; Stirzaker et al., 2021; Chen et al., 2022). However, social entrepreneurship is a complex activity, and scholars have paid insufficient attention to its process. In terms of research context, the research focuses on the results of social entrepreneurship in solving a wide range of social problems. The research on the particularity of social entrepreneurship to solve rural problems is not deep enough. In addition, the goal of social entrepreneurship is to use appropriate capabilities to ensure economic success, positive environmental impacts and social benefits. That is, sustainable entrepreneurship pursues the triple bottom line of economic, social and ecological goals (Belz and Binder, 2017). However, due to its special nature between business and charity, it is worth thinking about how social entrepreneurship can solve rural poverty in a sustainable way.

Social opportunity is an entrepreneurial opportunity in the context of social entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial opportunity refers to the mismatch between the demand and the corresponding product or service supply, which is the core of business entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Mair and Marti, 2006; Davidsson, 2015). The identification, development and utilization of entrepreneurial opportunities is an important aspect of the entrepreneurial process, which is also applicable to the field of agricultural entrepreneurship (Lans et al., 2013; Belz and Binder, 2017). It provides an unsaturated market for products or services and requires innovation or improvement of existing products or services (Singh, 2001).

The meaning and function of opportunities are different in the two entrepreneurial contexts. However, scholars pay more attention to opportunities in the business field. In an organization with a business mission, the entrepreneurial opportunity is often considered an opportunity to make money, with market response at its core. Therefore, it is difficult to apply to opportunities in the context of social entrepreneurship (Corner and Ho, 2010; Lehner and Kansikas, 2012). There are social opportunities in social evils and social problems (Lumpkin et al., 2013). Entrepreneurs should comprehensively consider factors such as social and moral environments and recognize that social entrepreneurship is an effective way to solve social problems. It is important that business activities be legal and socially beneficial (Brooks, 2009). Opportunity identification in the context of social entrepreneurship, which reflects the entrepreneur’s ability to detect value creation (Perrini et al., 2010) and the entrepreneur’s willingness to solve these social problems (Lumpkin et al., 2013), is the starting point and core of the social entrepreneurship process. Unfortunately, social entrepreneurship is still a relatively new concept in the academic field, and the research on opportunity identification in the field of social entrepreneurship is relatively scattered and unsystematic. For example, some scholars focus on the opportunity identification behavior of youth when preparing for social entrepreneurship (Zulfiqar et al., 2021). Moreover, the research on the types and realization process of social opportunities in the rural context is insufficient; multi-dimensional rural poverty provides different social opportunities, which needs to be summarized.

Quantitative and qualitative research are the two basic research methods (Creswell and Creswell, 2017). Qualitative research is a practice-oriented method, especially the case study method. It can describe the phenomenon of things (cases) and analyze the reasons in detail according to the actual development of enterprises, which is conducive to excavating the general rules and constructing new theories. In the field of social entrepreneurship research, most studies use qualitative research methods. For example, Cherrier et al. (2018), based on the ethnographic case of social risk in India, studied the possibility of institutional complexity providing opportunities for social entrepreneurs and identified strategic countermeasures to deal with institutional complexity. Munoz and Kibler (2016) used the fuzzy set method to explore the relationship between institutional complexity and social entrepreneurship.

This paper adopts the case study method for the following three reasons. First of all, this paper mainly discusses the mechanism and process of social entrepreneurship to alleviate rural poverty, which is still in its initial stage. Compared with quantitative methods that are conducive to testing theories, the case study method is more suitable for answering “how” and “why,” which helps this research to complete theoretical construction (Yin, 2014). Second, there are multiple constructs such as social opportunities and social entrepreneurship, each of that contains multiple subdivided dimensions. The case study method can be used to describe the dimensions and the relations of different constructs in a detailed way, which is helpful to reveal the relationships hidden behind the evolving and complex phenomena. Third, social entrepreneurship is an effective way to solve social problems, but there is little mature theoretical guidance on how to reduce rural poverty. Case study is a more appropriate research method to explore contextualization, which can develop rural real-life cases into a conceptual framework supported by existing literature (Pervez et al., 2013). We can improve the reliability and validity of the study by using multi-case replication logic, and make the conclusion testability and empirical validity (Eisenhardt, 1989; Yin, 2014).

Different from the statistical sampling principle in empirical studies, the selection of case study objects is mainly based on theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 1967), that is, the case selection should be consistent with the research theme, rather than representative of the whole. In this way, theoretical insights can be obtained through the connection between constructs (Eisenhardt and Graebner, 2007). This selection criterion based on case specificity rather than generality is known as “exploratory logic” (Yin, 2014).

Since research on social entrepreneurship is still in its infancy, given the research purpose, time, cost and difficulty of collection, there are three types of case sources: (1) case studies and papers, ensuring that their information is clear, accessible, and verified; (2) the official website of social entrepreneurial organizations, marketing materials and statistics provided by enterprises, and news reports; and (3) the website of the Trickle Out Africa Project and Business Call to Action (BCtA). Trickle Out provides an open case study platform for users, researchers and decision makers, and its public information comprises data on nearly 4,000 companies in 19 countries; the BCtA website provides a database of high-quality, inclusive business models across sectors and regions in 70 countries.

After screening, this paper identified a total 9 representative cases of rural social entrepreneurship, such as Nuru Energy, Drishtee and Tekera Resource Centre (Table 1). These cases come from various industries (agriculture, medical, education, energy, tourism, etc.) and countries (China, India, Bangladesh, etc.). Compared with homogeneous enterprises, heterogeneous enterprises provide a more solid theoretical foundation and improve the external validity of the research (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009).

After data collection and collation, the research drew lessons from Corbin and Strauss’s (2008) grounded theory coding method and used the software Nvivo to code and analyze the cases. New concepts and ideas are abstracted from the data and logical argumentation is carried out under the idea of verification or falsification (Jantunen and Gause, 2014).

The steps are as follows: (1) Open coding. Frist, we coded the cases from A to I (e.g., Xingeng Workshop-A, Drishtee-B), and conceptualized the information content. Then, after 130 initial concepts were obtained, they were combined and eliminated preliminarily to obtain 101 valid concepts. Finally, the concept was categorized to form 23 conceptual sub-categories. (2) Axial coding. This paper analyzed the potential relationships between the sub-categories and gradually integrated the main categories. (3) Selective coding. The research summarized the main categories as core categories or theoretical dimensions, and systematically associate them with other categories, thereby constructing a systematic theoretical framework. When coding, we constantly compared, analyzed and modified categories with similarities and differences, so as to improve theoretical accuracy and realize theoretical innovation (Kroeger et al., 2014). Due to the complexity of the coding process, refer to Ausrød et al. (2017), the research only shows the coding results, as shown in Table 2. Moreover, there are many first-order codes, so we have listed the typical concepts and the number of items.

Based on the existing literature, this paper selected and clarified the measure methods that best match the case data, so that the core constructs emerged from the cases. Their definition and explanation are as follows:

In order to ensure the reliability and validity, the following measures were taken in this study: (1) The reliability and validity of research design. This study follows the reproducibility principle of multiple case studies (Yin, 2014) to compare and verify the research conclusions, thus enhancing the persuasiveness. (2) The reliability and validity of case selection. The nine social enterprises belong to different regions and industries, which helps ensuring that information covers a certain theoretical breadth, and improving the scalability and external validity of research design. It is conducive to compare whether there are differences in the exploitation and realization of social opportunities in different poverty circumstances, so as to enhance the external validity of the research conclusions. (3) Reliability and validity of data collection. The case database was established to incorporate data from different sources for triangulation verification, so as to form an accurate and complete data chain. (4) Reliability and validity of data encoding. The researcher first determined the coding standard, then coded the first case, adjusted the coding rules after comparison, and finally coded the eight cases to ensure the uniformity of the coding standard. (5) Theory construction. After the theoretical dimensions were initially determined, other social enterprises were selected for the theoretical saturation test. By encoding and analyzing this part of data in turn, the extracted categories and main categories have been included in the existing categories, and no new categories have been extracted. This showed that the main category was well developed, and its structural dimension had a good theoretical saturation, so the sampling was stopped.

Through the generalization and reasoning of the internal mechanism of social entrepreneurship to solve the problem of rural poverty, and taking into account the constraints of second-hand data and geographical location, this study summarizes the conceptual framework of sustainable development for social entrepreneurship rather than utilizing an empirical model (Figure 2).

Sustainable social entrepreneurship is the process of identifying, developing, and utilizing opportunities. The goods or services they provide have social, economic, and ecological benefits, which is in line with the triple bottom line principle (Belz and Binder, 2017). The entire process of social entrepreneurship includes the impact of the two levels of society and enterprise, which is in line with the multilevel attributes of social enterprises (Le Pennec and Raufflet, 2018).

At the social level, multidimensional rural poverty often puts farmers in a difficult position, and they lack resources and skills. Compared with other groups, they are more likely to fall into the intergenerational poverty cycle (Lichter et al., 2015). However, many poverty issues coexist with the urgent needs of villagers, generating numerous development opportunities waiting to be discovered by social enterprises.

At the enterprise level, when a social enterprise recognizes a social opportunity, it often takes a series of actions to creatively use and combine resources to meet social needs (Mair and Marti, 2006). We find that in the process of solving rural poverty, the strategic action taken by social enterprises is to integrate farmers as suppliers, employees, and target customers into the value chain of the enterprise, and create social, economic and ecological value with (or for) them (Ebrahim et al., 2014; Dohrmann et al., 2015; Saebi et al., 2019).

This is a sustainable way of solving the problem of rural poverty, that is, to solve problems at the social level as the guideline and to take the strategy of the enterprise level as the promotion point. Social enterprises include farmers in the value chain, mobilize people to actively participate in poverty alleviation, and combine rural external and internal resources to improve rural predicaments in education, employment, medical care, and green energy. This will have long-term rather than short-term positive impacts on many aspects of economy, society and ecology, and in the end fulfill the mission of solving rural poverty.

This study uses a case study method to analyze the identification, development and realization of social opportunities in the process of social entrepreneurship under the rural context. We try to reveal the mechanism of social entrepreneurship to solve the rural poverty, and propose a conceptual framework for the sustainable development of social entrepreneurship. We find that social entrepreneurship is a process of identifying, developing and realizing social opportunities, and the economic value, social value and ecological value created by social entrepreneurship correspond to the solution of rural economic, social and ecological poverty. This is the essential process of social entrepreneurship promoting rural development. We also find the role of social opportunity in addressing rural poverty at both the social and corporate levels. There are three types of social opportunities driven by rural poverty at the social level, including opportunities in social, economic and ecological poverty. At the enterprise level, after identifying social opportunities, enterprises engage farmers in different parts of their value chain to develop and realize opportunities, which is a sustainable means of addressing poverty.

This study is of great significance both theoretically and practically for social entrepreneurship in solving the rural poverty. Firstly, this paper extends the theoretical research on the process perspective in the field of social entrepreneurship and answers how promoting poverty alleviation in rural areas. This study integrates rural poverty issues at the social level with actions at the enterprise level, fills the gap of social entrepreneurship theory in the rural field. From the perspective of social opportunities, we put forward the sustainable development framework of social entrepreneurship, which complements and improves the sustainability of social entrepreneurship. In practice, this paper provides concrete and sustainable ideas for solving rural poverty through social entrepreneurship. In addition, it has certain guiding significance to solve the problem of insufficient external support from the government, commercial enterprises and non-profit organizations.

Secondly, this paper enriches the research on the realization processes of social opportunities in the rural context. At present, the research on opportunity recognition in the field of social entrepreneurship is scattered. Moreover, the existing research on social opportunities focuses on the research paradigm of commercial enterprises and ignores the particularity of social opportunities. We summarize the rural social opportunities in social poverty, economic poverty and ecological poverty. It provides ideas for enterprises to identify social opportunities effectively, and also fills the gap of research. Also, we find that farmers’ participation in the value chain is an important means of social opportunity development. It not only helps to explain the mechanism process of social entrepreneurship to solve rural poverty, but also helps to guide the practice of social entrepreneurship, and provides a new solution path for enterprises to realize social, economic and ecological value. The introduction of value chain lines also helps to visualize solutions to the complex problem of rural poverty. By taking farmers as suppliers, employers and consumers, social entrepreneurship not only neatly solves the obstacles to the sustainable development, but also helps rural areas to fundamentally control and deal with complex social challenges.

While our study offers some important insights, it also has limitations that open the way for future research. First, our research limits the sources of social opportunities to the three dimensions of poverty, and there are further sources and types of social opportunities waiting to be explored. Second, due to time and resource constraints, our study is limited to a conceptual framework rather than utilizing an empirical model. Nonetheless, we believe that theoretical generalizations of the mechanisms emerging in this study are possible. Future research can use multi-source data such as interviews and panel data to conduct more rigorous empirical tests and develop it into a successful model. In addition, the universality of the model remains to be further examined in different contexts. Future research could focus on a certain region or country and propose more targeted poverty solutions.