Problem, person, and pathway: A framework for social innovators

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Introduction

In the last decade, the appetite for learning about social innovation has intensified, and universities around the world have tried to keep up by creating an array of new courses, certificates, and degree programs (Lawrence, Phillips and Tracey, 2012). As researchers, educators, and advisers, how can we better prepare social innovators for the work of addressing the world’s pressing social problems at the relevant scale? We undertook this inquiry in recent years as we researched, taught, and advised social innovators around the globe. Broadly, we view social innovation as innovation with the intent to address social problems. Rather than assuming that creating something new is good, we consider innovation in light of its potential to lead to positive social impact, that is, to improve the lives of individuals and communities (Seelos and Mair, 2017). From our experience, we identified three key lenses to help social innovators contribute to social change, which culminated in what we call the “3P” framework that considers the nature of: the problem at hand, the person pursuing change, and the pathway to change (see Figure 1). For both new and experienced social innovators, considering the alignment of these 3Ps can provide an organizing template that helps them to think and act in ways more likely to benefit individual and communities. We find that exploring the problem, person, and pathway in turn can also shed light on the corresponding interrelationships, and where there may or may not be overlap. Rather than providing a one-size-fits-all blueprint, at its core the 3P framework offers sets of questions for social innovators to unpack and update iteratively. This approach encourages individuals and groups to find the “fit” between different elements.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

The 3P framework is based on a situational approach (Hersey and Blanchard, 1977) to social innovation that accounts for ways in which different contexts may call for different responses. It also accounts for the politics of change. Addressing social problems often requires coordinating shifts in behavior across diverse individuals and institutions, and sometimes even sectors (see Alinsky, 1971; Battilana, 2015; Snow and Soule, 2010). Accordingly, accounting for the situational, interpersonal, and structural dynamics of power is key as a basis for realistic understanding and action (Pfeffer, 1992). This does not mean that the 3Ps is a tool meant for those who already have power. Social innovators often challenge power hierarchies. Even when they do not already have the power to do so, those seeking change can work to build their power bases in order to enhance their impact. From that standpoint, we view the 3Ps as an inclusive tool that also aims to help empower marginalized individuals and groups aspiring to participate in a movement for change. Furthermore, although the 3P framework is meant as a tool to help guide the thinking and action of individual social innovators, a single individual very rarely succeeds in developing and disseminating social innovations alone. As we elaborate below, such an adoption most often involves collective action. Accordingly, each social innovator is part of a broader movement toward social change (Battilana and Kimsey, 2017). In presenting the 3Ps below, we emphasize the importance of thinking beyond the individual level and accounting for the cultivation of collective capacities often critical for social change.

In the remainder of this chapter, we delve into each element of the 3P framework— problem, person, and pathway—in turn. Although our discussion proceeds in a linear sequence, we intend the learning journey to be iterative, whereby social innovators regularly revisit their assumptions and the sets of questions posed as circumstances change over time.

Social innovators often approach issues with interventions already in mind. However, enacting a prespecified solution without thoroughly understanding the problem risks causing negative unintended consequences. The stakes are high for social innovators, whose mistakes can incur not only costs for themselves, but also costs for those they seek to serve. To unpack the problem in the 3P framework, we put forward the questions: What is the nature of the problem? What is the problem statement?

What Is the Nature of the Problem?

Social innovators may feel emboldened when they think that they know more than they do, or, on the flip side, feel paralyzed by the web of interconnected moving pieces. Intractability is a common reason given to delay action and diminish aspirations. In a middle way between naivety and paralysis, we encourage social innovators to identify sets of stakeholders and come to recognize their distinct perspectives. This exploration can provide an entry point into understanding the material and social conditions of the particular locality of the problem that social innovators seek to address.

Such an exploration is critical for social innovators to understand the nature of the problem at hand. Specifically, it can help them identify the various factors that contribute to the problem’s reproduction. These factors may be economic, cognitive, normative, and/or political. For many problems, such dynamics are intertwined—with, for instance, deeply rooted gender roles (normative) intertwined with insecure property rights (political), and low levels of income (economic) intertwined with people’s ability to make decisions about the future (cognitive). Yet, depending on the problem, each kind of factor may be more or less important as barriers to change than others. Mapping these factors and understanding how they contribute to the problem can help social innovators to overcome them (Seelos and Mair, 2017).

Our experience suggests that in order to fully understand the nature of the problem, there is no replacement for social innovators immersing themselves in the places where the problem exists, getting to know firsthand the distinct social norms, power hierarchies, legal rules, economic systems, historical legacies, and physical landscapes. Various established techniques for such immersion have grown out of the study of ethnography, which grounds interpretations of the perspectives of those under study in firsthand experiences of the setting (see Atkinson et al., 2001). Action research, dating back to Lewin (1951), has sought “to take knowledge production beyond the gate-keeping of professional knowledge makers… to the people” (Bradbury-Huang, 2010). In participatory systemic inquiry, people try to find out everything possible about what, how, why, where, and with whom issues unfold in a specific ecosystem.

Such an approach can help outsiders and insiders alike learn about the setting with the use of open-ended prompts that try to ascertain what is present, rather than focusing on what is missing. Being intentional about expanding the reference frame beyond “people like you” also helps reveal hidden narratives, besides dominant ones that maintain existing norms and hierarchies (Burns and Worsley, 2015).

Engaging in this kind of field-based inquiry is critical for social innovators to uncover stakeholders’ habits of thought and action that contribute to perpetuating the status quo. Habits of action refer to the sequences of steps underlying flows of materials, money, and information. Habits of thought encompass people’s narratives of themselves, each other, and the wider context (Forrester, 1971). When considered together, these habits can surface underlying distributions of power that reproduce asymmetries (Battilana, 2015). In the 3P framework, we encourage social innovators to create, and update, stakeholder maps that account for these habits of thought and action and demarcate the array of interrelated individuals and groups: who is harmed by the current reality (potential beneficiaries), who cares about an alternative future (potential allies), who benefits from the current reality (potential resistors), and who observes the current reality without particularly caring about it (potential fence sitters). Crucially, these categories are neither mutually exclusive nor static. A potential beneficiary may also be an ally, and a potential fence sitter may become a resistor.

At the same time that we encourage social innovators to investigate what stakeholders take for granted, we also encourage social innovators to revisit their own assumptions. Cognitive scientists and psychologists widely accept that people create and use mental models of external

reality to help them engage with the world (Craik, 1943; Johnson-Laird, 1983). Yet, people’s ability to represent reality accurately is inherently limited and context-dependent (see Jones, Ross, Lynam, Perez and Leitch, 2011). Without reflection on their own mental models, social innovators risk blocking their way, and even exacerbating problems as they interact with and on behalf of others. To meet this challenge, social innovators can approach iterations of their stakeholder maps as hypotheses to test further rather than facts to validate firmly. In the process, they may compare whether potential beneficiaries, allies, resistors, and fence sitters share their own internal representations or not. Social innovators may also work to apply the notion of “unlearning.” As they surface their particular ways of relating to the world, social innovators not only can come to discard unhelpful mental models, but also can cultivate new openness to not knowing (Brook, Pedler, Abbott and Burgoyne, 2016).

What Is the Problem Statement?

A clearly formulated problem statement is an underappreciated tool (Astor, Morales, Kieffer and Repenning, 2016), both as an internal compass for individual social innovators, and for external communication to cement a shared purpose and mobilize collective resources inclusively. Psychologists have long found that individuals exert more effort and focus in the face of understandable goals (see Locke and Latham, 2003). A growing body of evidence suggests that mental contrasting in particular can help spur action, whereby individuals juxtapose positive aspects about a desired future with negative aspects of the status quo (Oettingen, Hönig and Gollwitzer, 2000). A corresponding way to approach problem formulation is to demarcate the gap between the current reality and a goal state. The current reality captures how the world is, while a goal state captures a notion of how the world could be different. That gap is a source of creative tension, with tension dissipating either when reality rises to the level of a goal state, or a goal state lowers to the level of reality (Senge, 2009).

Such problem formulation is a delicate dance. Imagining a goal state can easily lead to presupposing a solution, yet a problem statement loses its potency when it is actually a solution in disguise (Astor, Morales, Kieffer and Repenning, 2016). For example, saying “most Ugandans still do not live near an electric grid” assumes that access to an electric grid leads to reliable power, that proximity to a grid guarantees connection, that a connection guarantees the necessary power, and that power is affordable. A broader formulation—such as “just 30% of Ugandans have a reliable supply of energy throughout the day”—leaves room for more open investigation of the problem, as well as pathways to change.

In our experience, social innovators very rarely formulate a problem once and leave that statement static. Instead, they iterate and adjust their formulations of the problem over time, based on both their more nuanced understandings of the current reality and fresh visions of alternative futures. One common theme of effective problem statements, though, is that they enable social innovators to distinguish the direction of progress (Astor, Morales, Kieffer and Repenning, 2016). In the energy example, it is clear that the goal state involves an increase in the number of Ugandans whose access to energy is affordable, continuous, and reliable.

In addition to understanding and communicating about the problem, social innovators often need to understand and communicate about themselves as individuals. Rather than such introspection amounting to indulgent navel-gazing, we find the opposite—that it can help social innovators contribute more effectively to collective action when they can be both inward- and outward- looking. Addressing social problems often requires breaking with existing norms, and a single individual rarely succeeds alone. Instead, social innovators contribute to collective movements toward change (Ganz and McKenna, forthcoming). To do so, we encourage social innovators to probe how they can harness their motivations and sources of power to benefit individuals and communities, while ensuring their efforts have the necessary legitimacy and support (Moore, 1997). To understand person in the 3P framework, we invite the questions: What are the motivations? What are the sources of power? In answering both, we encourage social innovators to look inwardly at themselves as well as outwardly to account for other stakeholders’ motivations and sources of power.

What Are the Motivations?

Social innovators need to persevere when uncertainty looms, momentum slows, new obstacles arise, and critics become louder. Such perseverance requires passion and courage (see Kanter, 2005b). One side of this coin is emotional. Marshall Ganz, for example, suggests combatting inertia with urgency, apathy with anger, fear with hope, isolation with solidarity, and self-doubt with the belief that an individual can make a difference (Ganz, 2011). Another dimension is mindset. Carol Dweck has pioneered a growing body of research on the growth mindset, showing that when people perceive failure as an opportunity to learn and strengthen themselves, rather than a sign of permanent inadequacy, they are more likely to exert additional effort, take risks, and achieve long-term goals (Dweck, 2007). For new and experienced social innovators alike, such a growth mindset can help in the face of complexity and resistance.

Furthermore, the public never recognizes many who contribute to collective action, and the level of control of a single individual in a movement for change is often limited. While some motivations may inevitably ebb and flow over time, we find that people who can tap into a lasting personal sense of purpose are more likely to persevere in the face of setbacks, or when their work does not receive the anticipated public recognition.

Moreover, because social innovators often coordinate with others to be able to improve the lives of individuals and communities, we encourage them not only to examine their own motivations, but also to consider the motivations of others from their perspectives. Such understanding of others is critical in order to mobilize and organize effectively as part of a movement for change (Benford and Snow, 2000; Bernstein, 1997; Tilly, 1999). Doing so requires tailoring communication accordingly such that it provides potential partners with resonant meanings and shared identities to help bring them into a coalition (Snow and Soule, 2010). When social innovators can connect their own motivations to values shared by the coalition, this alignment of feeling can also help the alignment of action.

What Are the Sources of Power?

In our experience, social innovators too often underestimate political considerations in pursuit of their noble goals. Many gravitate to the technical aspects of a perceived solution while discounting relational elements. Take the example of a mobile application for farmers in India that reports up-to-date levels of local agricultural prices. While the technical aspect of this social innovation may function brilliantly on mobile phones, its ability to empower farmers also inextricably depends on the relational dynamics of the relative bargaining power between farmers and middlemen who sell their products to restaurants and grocery stores.

Underestimating the political aspect of empowering farmers, and what is at stake for those involved, can render social innovators ineffective, or even harmful. Ultimately, power is not a possession that some people have inherited or accumulated while others lack it. Power depends on the situation and the extent to which people therein control access to resources, tangible or intangible, that others value.

We encourage social innovators to think systematically about the sources of power available to contribute to social change, both their own as individuals and those of existing and potential partners. In the 3P framework, we distinguish between personal, positional, and relational sources of power. Each is important to consider with respect to individual social innovators as well those who make up their coalitions. Personal sources of power are internal, deriving from personality, experience, and expertise. Positional sources come from formal roles in organizations and society. Relational sources come from connections with family, friends, and colleagues (Battilana, 2015). We encourage social innovators to map all of these sources of power, assessing themselves individually, as well their influence on others and the strength or weakness of their social ties. Besides creating their own such map, we also encourage social innovators to map the sources of power of potential beneficiaries, allies, resistors, and fence sitters.

Overall, sources of power are far from fixed. They often change over time and space, across different relationships and as the problem statement or proposed vehicle for change shifts. It is thus critical for social innovators to update their stakeholder analysis regularly, in order to more accurately capture stakeholder orientations toward the proposed change and their sources of power. The effectiveness of various sources of power will accordingly also depend on the context. Different sources may be more or less critical for different tasks and across different relationships. Influencing others and convincing them to join a movement for change draws heavily on relational sources of power in the form of strong social ties (see Battilana and Casciaro, 2012, 2013). If social innovators do not have the dispositions and networks to build coalitions, they may grow them over time, and/or team up with others who do, to bring these strengths into the movement.

Besides the problem and person, the remaining P of the 3Ps is the pathway to change. Because social change often results from coordinated action, we encourage social innovators to account

systematically for how their efforts can most effectively complement other existing ones in the ecosystem. Importantly, we also see potential beneficiaries as potential partners in addressing the problem. To help guide social innovators in assessing different pathways to change in the 3P framework, we pose the questions: What are possible vehicles for social impact? What could scaling social impact look like?

What Are Possible Vehicles to Social Impact?

The universe of potential entry points to push for social change tends to be manifold (Kanter, 2005a; Tracey and Stott, 2017). At one end of the spectrum, some occupy themselves with “arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” (Meadows, 1999, p. 6). Indeed, taking the existing rules of the game for granted can translate into smaller social impact. At the other end of the spectrum, social innovators may utilize leverage points to try and alter the goals of the system as well as the mindsets that perpetuate it (see Meadows, 2008). Such divergent changes that break with taken-for-granted ways of thinking and behaving are especially challenging to push, because they tend to face more resistance (see Battilana and Casciaro, 2012, 2013).

In the 3P framework, we encourage social innovators to consider multiple possible vehicles to social change in light of their potential to improve the lives of individuals and communities. This exploration goes against the impulses of social innovators to latch onto to their first idea for a solution, or to bend to the wills of donors and investors who can provide financing but whose stipulations compromise social impact. In different settings, the route to social impact may be on the back of individual or collective action, starting new initiatives or working within existing ones, a single organization or collaboration across organizations, cooperation that is officially or loosely bound, or some combination.

Individually, social innovators can try to push for change as authors, speakers, and performers. As a scientist, Rachel Carson sought to alert the American public that pesticides were toxic in the 1950s and 60s. Through her writing, speeches, and Congressional testimony, she helped spur new policies to protect people’s health and the environment. At the same time, the limits of individual action tend to be stark. Social impact needs a movement toward change to launch and develop. Carson’s work had impact precisely because it gave rise to such a collective movement in the United States and beyond (Kisfalvi and Maguire, 2011).

Some social innovators jump to the conclusion that they need to a create a new organization to address the problem at hand. Yet, in some contexts, the sources of power available through existing organizations or movements may outweigh the flexibility of creating a new entity. There are increasingly institutional channels for such “social intrapreneurship” across organizational structures and sectors (Davis and White, 2015). Among collective movements, social innovations such as fair trade agreements have emerged out of movements for ethical international development and solidarity. Among businesses, new strategies have tried to take sustainability seriously, like the Sustainable Living Plan at the multinational corporation Unilever. In governments and not-for-profits, innovation labs are emerging, including across the European Union and in the large not-for-profit BRAC based in Bangladesh (Tracey and Stott,

2017). Whichever the sector, social intrapreneurship may take place as part of internal operations in a single division or multiple; in a subsidiary that is partial, complete, or a joint venture; as part of a partnership that is formal or informal; or some combination of arrangements (Kistruck and Beamish, 2010).

Alternatively, social innovators may realize that they need to start new organizations to enhance their social impact—a typical not-for-profit, business, public entity, or some hybrid of these traditional organizational forms, like social enterprises. To compare across different possible vehicles for social change, we encourage social innovators to map how different options could create value and for whom (Mair and Martí, 2006). The rapid prototyping that characterizes design thinking can be helpful when it comes to experimenting with various kinds of pathways. The process of engaging beneficiaries and/or customers early and often can help reveal unexpected opportunities and challenges, including at “the edges, the places where ‘extreme’ people live differently, think differently, and consume differently” (Brown and Wyatt, 2010, p. 32).

Regardless of the vehicle, social innovators will need to chart a path that involves collaborating and coordinating with others, often across sectors, to address social problems. While governmental contracting and community development projects involving both the corporate and social sectors have become more mainstream, cross-sector work can still be difficult to organize and sustain. Different missions, values, accountabilities, and constituencies can make the task of aligning interests formidable (Bryson, Crosby and Stone, 2006). Yet, examples of effective models to reconcile fundamental partner differences do exist, such as the partnership between the Norwegian corporation Telenor and the Bangladeshi social enterprise Grameen Bank (Seelos and Mair, 2007).

What Could Scaling Social Impact Look Like?

Scale is a hot topic in research and practice (see Shah and Han, 2018). Our approach focuses on expanding and/or adapting to match the magnitude of the problem at hand. One aspect of such scale may be organizational growth—increasing revenue, staff, and offices. However, growing an organization does not always translate to scaling social impact (Gugelev and Stern, 2015). In the 3P framework, we encourage social innovators to investigate the gamut of scaling options in light of their potential to match the magnitude of the problem in its entirety. Besides options in terms of what to scale—a product, program, model, organization, principles, or some combination—social innovators also face the choice of how to scale—across geographies, activities, and/or collaborations.

Geographically, social innovators may try to replicate what they already do in new communities, provinces, countries, and/or regions. Such expansion might happen in new branches, franchises, or subsidiaries. A particular risk here is not accounting for the context- specific nature of some innovations’ initial successes that could prevent growth. Even BRAC, often considered one of the most effective and experienced international development organizations, struggled after it decided to expand its Bangladeshi operations to new countries.

Despite decades of experience and a large cadre of professional staff, the organization had to stop or spin off programs that it failed to adapt to new contexts (Seelos and Mair, 2017).

Changing the parameters of activities and collaborations also requires attention to the different sources of power necessary to understand these different kinds of tasks and relationships, as well as balancing more or less control over outcomes. In terms of activities, social innovators may grow their operations by expanding the range of activities that they undertake, either upstream or downstream. In terms of collaborations, social innovators may grow their operations by working with new stakeholders—in the arenas of government, business, not-for-profits, and/or social enterprise—in new kinds of arrangements. Through open source platforms, social innovators may disseminate their innovations for free. With affiliations, social innovators may create networks with external partners to replicate or adopt their innovations for fees. A team led by medical doctors Atul Gawande and Bill Berry, for example, collaborated with the World Health Organization to leverage its global influence to disseminate the first Surgical Safety Checklist for operating rooms around the world. After rapid iterations of the design and content, the World Health Organization issued the first edition of this checklist in 2008 and a second in 2009. Today operating rooms across the globe, in developed and developing countries alike, are utilizing the checklist, whose implementation was associated with a 36-percent drop in postoperative complications in diverse settings (Haynes et al., 2009).

To consider different scaling trajectories side-by-side, social innovators have multiple tools at their disposal. Through research and evaluation, they can better understand which aspects of their innovations are core and which can be flexible. Through enabling adaptation, they can support modifications that meet the needs of a growing number of beneficiaries.

Through reducing the resources required for implementation, they can lower some of the burden of dissemination. Through willingness to rethink their innovations, they can enhance their ability to evolve as the context evolves. Through empowering users, they can inclusively, and powerfully, harness users’ knowledge as “co-evaluators,” “co-designers,” and “co-scalers” (see Clarke and Dede, 2009).

Finding the fit

Rather than providing definite or prescriptive answers, the 3P framework draws attention to essential sets of questions for investigation. The culmination of the framework is the intersection between the problem, person, and pathway. At this intersection is the locus of action that accounts for the fit of each element in relation to each other.

How do the problem and pathway fit? Some vehicles for social change may address the symptoms of the problem but not its root causes. The way that particular resistors think and act may make some pathways especially difficult to champion. How do the problem and person fit? Individuals’ levels of direct experience with the problem is likely to inflect not only their understandings and motivations internally but also their sources of power and perceived legitimacy externally. How do the person and pathway fit? Some pathways may require sources of power that individuals do not currently have, while some motivations may lead people to other

vehicles for change. Altogether, how do the problem, person, and pathway fit? This question is literally the center of the 3P framework (see Figure 1), whereby we encourage social innovators to understand and undertake their roles in movements for change attuned to the dynamic interplay across the problem, person, and pathway.

Each year students join the ranks of our universities with aspirations to make the world a better place. Given the scale, scope, and persistence of the world’s most pressing social problems, we have joined together with them in serious consideration of this premise and have committed as researchers, teachers, and advisers to support social innovators navigating the complexities of initiating and implementing social change, while in school and beyond. Over time, our hope is that insights produced through these efforts will contribute to a dynamic knowledge base that accelerates learning in the field of social innovation, grounded in a better understanding of the role that social innovators can play in creating and sustaining a more just and livable world.

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Seelos, C. and J. Mair (2014), ‘Organizational closure competencies and scaling: A realist approach to theorizing social enterprise’, in J.C. Short (ed.), Social Entrepreneurship and Research Methods, Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing, pp. 147-188.

Seelos, C. and J. Mair (2016), ‘When innovation goes wrong’, Stanford Social Innovation Review , Fall, 27-33.

Seelos, Christian and Johanna Mair (2017), Innovation and Scaling for Impact: How Effective Social Enterprises Do It , Stanford, CA: Stanford Business Books.

Senge, Peter M. (2009), ‘The leader’s new work: Building learning organizations’, in Gill Robinson Hickman (ed.), Leading Organization: Perspectives for a New Era , London, UK: SAGE Publications.

Shah, Sonal and Jun Han (2018), ‘The ecosystem of scaling social impact: A new theoretical framework and its application’, Working Paper.

Snow, David A. and Sarah. A. Soule (2010), A Primer on Social Movements , New York, NY:

W.W. Norton & Company.

Tilly, Charles (1999), ‘From interactions to outcomes in social movements’, How Social Movements Matter, 10 , 253–70.

Tracey, Paul and Stott, Neil (2017), ‘Social innovation: A window on alternative ways of organizing and innovating’, Innovation , 19 (1), 51–60.

Jamie D. Aten Ph.D.

Using Psychology to Address Social Problems

Dr. wolff and dr. glassgold speak on psychology's problem solving ability..

Posted October 24, 2020

Joshua Wolff, used with permission

Psychology affects every aspect of our lives. How can we use this on an individual, communal, and structural level to address social problems?

Joshua R. Wolff , Ph.D. (he/him) is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology (Psy.D. Program) at Adler University in Chicago, IL. Dr. Wolff co-chairs the APA Division 44 (Society for the Psychology of Sexual Orientation & Gender Diversity) Subcommittee on Higher Education Accreditation & Policy. Dr. Wolff’s research and publications center on the experiences of LGBTQ+ students in religious university settings, higher education policy, and social determinants of health.

Judith Glassgold, used with permission

Judith Glassgold, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist and an expert in applying psychology to problems of public policy, focused on mental health. She is a consultant to national civil rights organizations on legislative efforts to improve mental health at the federal, state, and local levels. She is a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology.

Jamie Aten: How would you personally define psychological training pathways?

Joshua Wolff and Judith Glassgold : Professional psychology spans multiple settings and serves very diverse groups of people. Thus, psychological training must also be diverse and give students the training they need for multiple career pathways. Professional psychology needs to expand opportunities for students to go beyond traditional health settings. This means that we need to think broadly about where our students get 'real world' experience — not just in traditional settings (e.g., hospitals, university research labs), but in settings and domains that haven’t been as well explored or may still be underutilized.

Examples that come to mind include forensic settings (jails, prisons), community non-profit organizations, government agencies, K-12 schools, workplace, military and veterans, and early childhood centers. Training also needs to span teaching our students how to communicate beyond academic and medical settings, but also with mainstream media, politicians, and the public.

JA: What are some ways these expanded opportunities can help us live more resiliently?

JW and JG : Psychology affects every aspect of our lives — the ways we make decisions, our motivation , how we feel, how we connect to other people, what types of job responsibilities we enjoy, etc. Thus, psychologists can be useful and improve a person’s quality of life in almost any setting.

We need to think about this on an individual level (e.g., how do we help the person who comes to my office for mental health treatment?), on a community level (e.g., how do we encourage everyone in my city or state to prevent the spread of COVID-19 ?) and structural level (what policies encourage or reduce health and wellbeing?). This means that psychological research needs to think in innovative ways to address social problems that build resiliency in a broad range of settings.

We also need to be better at quickly sharing the results of our research so that the data is useful to the people and communities that might benefit from it the most.

JA: What are some ways people can influence psychological policy?

JW and JG : We find it exciting that there are lots of ways to influence policy! For example, this can be at the institutional level where you advocate for changes to your curriculum or learning. I have seen students get engaged by running for their Student Government Association and making a big impact in their college or graduate school program. This can also be at the systems and structural level — this might include sending an elected official an email about a topic you care about, attending a town hall, joining efforts within professional associations, meeting in person with elected officials or their staff, seeking employment in government or media, and running for office.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach – thus, advocacy is diverse, and everyone can engage in different ways. One tip though is ‘don’t go it alone’ (i.e., find other people who share your interests and want to influence policy together).

JA: Any advice for how we might use this knowledge to support a friend or loved one struggling with a difficult life situation?

JW and JG : There are several recent studies that demonstrate that many individuals are struggling, especially those grieving the loss of friends and families, individuals from ethnic minority communities, and essential workers, College and graduate students are experiencing a lot more stress and worry right now due to the COVID-19 pandemic as important life transitions are disrupted. This includes financial stress, worry about loved ones, and social isolation due to remote learning. Thus, I try to remind individuals that it is ‘normal’ to feel discouraged, down, or different right now. I want to keep reminding them that they are not alone in feeling this way because so many of us are in the same boat together.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

One option is to stay connected through virtual resources that focus on wellness. Many health insurance companies, state and local governments, clinics, and non-profits are now offering free or low-cost mental health and substance use care for virtual, and telehealth sessions. Now is a great time to speak with a mental health professional to get extra support if that is something you have been thinking about or may need (though always check with your insurance first, since plans and coverage can vary widely!).

JA: What are you currently working on that you might like to share about?

JW : I recently co-authored a report on the impact of COVID-19 on psychology training and education. We sampled a diverse group of leaders within Divisions, affiliates, and a committee of the American Psychological Association (APA). I’m really proud of the Report because people shared some very important concerns, and also identified ways that we can advocate and better support students. You can obtain a free copy of the Report here .

JG : My academic institution committed itself to focusing on social justice during the 2020-2021 academic year. I have made my course relevant to the stresses and issues that we are currently facing in society. For example, my mental health policy class includes material relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic and health equity. I focus on the important research on social determinants of health that can build resilience , slow the pandemic through proactive behavior change, reduce discrimination , and increase equitable policies. Graduate students seem engaged in making a positive difference in areas as diverse as increasing resources for people with neurodiversity , reducing institutional violence, support for immigrants, children’s mental health during the pandemic, and equitable school policies.

Glassgold, J.M. ,& Wolff, J.R (2020). Expanding Psychology Training Pathways for Public Policy Preparedness Across the Professional Lifespan. American Psychologist, 75(7), 933-944. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000696

Jamie D. Aten Ph.D.

Jamie Aten , Ph.D. , is the founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College.

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1.2: Sociological Perspectives on Social Problems

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Learning Objectives

  • Define the sociological imagination.
  • Explain what is meant by the blaming-the-victim belief.
  • Summarize the most important beliefs and assumptions of functionalism and conflict theory.
  • Summarize the most important beliefs and assumptions of symbolic interactionism and exchange theory.

The sociological understanding of social problems rests heavily on the concept of the sociological imagination . We discuss this concept in some detail before turning to various theoretical perspectives that provide a further context for understanding social problems.

The Sociological Imagination

Many individuals experience one or more social problems personally. For example, many people are poor and unemployed, many are in poor health, and many have family problems, drink too much alcohol, or commit crime. When we hear about these individuals, it is easy to think that their problems are theirs alone, and that they and other individuals with the same problems are entirely to blame for their difficulties.

Sociology takes a different approach, as it stresses that individual problems are often rooted in problems stemming from aspects of society itself. This key insight informed C. Wright Mills’s (1959) (Mills, 1959) classic distinction between personal troubles and public issues. Personal troubles refer to a problem affecting individuals that the affected individual, as well as other members of society, typically blame on the individual’s own personal and moral failings. Examples include such different problems as eating disorders, divorce, and unemployment. Public issues , whose source lies in the social structure and culture of a society, refer to social problems affecting many individuals. Problems in society thus help account for problems that individuals experience. Mills felt that many problems ordinarily considered private troubles are best understood as public issues, and he coined the term sociological imagination to refer to the ability to appreciate the structural basis for individual problems.

To illustrate Mills’s viewpoint, let’s use our sociological imaginations to understand some contemporary social problems. We will start with unemployment, which Mills himself discussed. If only a few people were unemployed, Mills wrote, we could reasonably explain their unemployment by saying they were lazy, lacked good work habits, and so forth. If so, their unemployment would be their own personal trouble. But when millions of people are out of work, unemployment is best understood as a public issue because, as Mills (Mills, 1959) put it, “the very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.”

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When only a few people are out of work, it is fair to say that their unemployment is their personal trouble. However, when millions of people are out of work, as has been true since the economic downturn began in 2008, this massive unemployment is more accurately viewed as a public issue. As such, its causes lie not in the unemployed individuals but rather in our society’s economic and social systems.

Rawle C. Jackman – The line of hope… – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The high US unemployment rate stemming from the severe economic downturn that began in 2008 provides a telling example of the point Mills was making. Millions of people lost their jobs through no fault of their own. While some individuals are undoubtedly unemployed because they are lazy or lack good work habits, a more structural explanation focusing on lack of opportunity is needed to explain why so many people were out of work. If so, unemployment is best understood as a public issue rather than a personal trouble.

Another social problem is eating disorders. We usually consider a person’s eating disorder to be a personal trouble that stems from a lack of control, low self-esteem, or another personal problem. This explanation may be OK as far as it goes, but it does not help us understand why so many people have the personal problems that lead to eating disorders. Perhaps more important, this belief also neglects the larger social and cultural forces that help explain such disorders. For example, most Americans with eating disorders are women, not men. This gender difference forces us to ask what it is about being a woman in American society that makes eating disorders so much more common. To begin to answer this question, we need to look to the standard of beauty for women that emphasizes a slender body (Boyd, et. al., 2011). If this cultural standard did not exist, far fewer American women would suffer from eating disorders than do now. Because it does exist, even if every girl and woman with an eating disorder were cured, others would take their places unless we could somehow change this standard. Viewed in this way, eating disorders are best understood as a public issue, not just as a personal trouble.

Picking up on Mills’s insights, William Ryan (1976) (Ryan, 1976) pointed out that Americans typically think that social problems such as poverty and unemployment stem from personal failings of the people experiencing these problems, not from structural problems in the larger society. Using Mills’s terms, Americans tend to think of social problems as personal troubles rather than public issues. As Ryan put it, they tend to believe in blaming the victim rather than blaming the system.

To help us understand a blaming-the-victim ideology, let’s consider why poor children in urban areas often learn very little in their schools. According to Ryan, a blaming-the-victim approach would say the children’s parents do not care about their learning, fail to teach them good study habits, and do not encourage them to take school seriously. This type of explanation, he wrote, may apply to some parents, but it ignores a much more important reason: the sad shape of America’s urban schools, which, he said, are overcrowded, decrepit structures housing old textbooks and out-of-date equipment. To improve the schooling of children in urban areas, he wrote, we must improve the schools themselves and not just try to “improve” the parents.

As this example suggests, a blaming-the-victim approach points to solutions to social problems such as poverty and illiteracy that are very different from those suggested by a more structural approach that blames the system. If we blame the victim, we would spend our limited dollars to address the personal failings of individuals who suffer from poverty, illiteracy, poor health, eating disorders, and other difficulties. If instead we blame the system, we would focus our attention on the various social conditions (decrepit schools, cultural standards of female beauty, and the like) that account for these difficulties. A sociological understanding suggests that the latter approach is ultimately needed to help us deal successfully with the social problems facing us today.

Theoretical Perspectives

Three theoretical perspectives guide sociological thinking on social problems: functionalist theory, conflict theory, and symbolic interactionist theory. These perspectives look at the same social problems, but they do so in different ways. Their views taken together offer a fuller understanding of social problems than any of the views can offer alone. Table 1.1 “Theory Snapshot” summarizes the three perspectives.

Functionalism

Functionalism, also known as the functionalist theory or perspective, arose out of two great revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first was the French Revolution of 1789, whose intense violence and bloody terror shook Europe to its core. The aristocracy throughout Europe feared that revolution would spread to their own lands, and intellectuals feared that social order was crumbling.

The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century reinforced these concerns. Starting first in Europe and then in the United States, the Industrial Revolution led to many changes, including the rise and growth of cities as people left their farms to live near factories. As the cities grew, people lived in increasingly poor, crowded, and decrepit conditions, and crime was rampant. Here was additional evidence, if European intellectuals needed it, of the breakdown of social order.

In response, the intellectuals began to write that a strong society, as exemplified by strong social bonds and rules and effective socialization, was needed to prevent social order from disintegrating. Without a strong society and effective socialization, they warned, social order breaks down, and violence and other signs of social disorder result.

This general framework reached fruition in the writings of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a French scholar largely responsible for the sociological perspective, as we now know it. Adopting the conservative intellectuals’ view of the need for a strong society, Durkheim felt that human beings have desires that result in chaos unless society limits them (Durkheim, 1952). It does so, he wrote, through two related social mechanisms: socialization and social integration. Socialization helps us learn society’s rules and the need to cooperate, as people end up generally agreeing on important norms and values, while social integration, or our ties to other people and to social institutions such as religion and the family, helps socialize us and integrate us into society and reinforce our respect for its rules.

Today’s functionalist perspective arises out of Durkheim’s work and that of other conservative intellectuals of the nineteenth century. It uses the human body as a model for understanding society. In the human body, our various organs and other body parts serve important functions for the ongoing health and stability of our body. Our eyes help us see, our ears help us hear, our heart circulates our blood, and so forth. Just as we can understand the body by describing and understanding the functions that its parts serve for its health and stability, so can we understand society by describing and understanding the functions that its parts—or, more accurately, its social institutions—serve for the ongoing health and stability of society. Thus functionalism emphasizes the importance of social institutions such as the family, religion, and education for producing a stable society.

947a375277b697372942d0cd4bfcfad5.jpg

Émile Durkheim was a founder of sociology and is largely credited with developing the functionalist perspective. (Marxists.org – public domain.)

Similar to the view of the conservative intellectuals from which it grew, functionalism is skeptical of rapid social change and other major social upheaval. The analogy to the human body helps us understand this skepticism. In our bodies, any sudden, rapid change is a sign of danger to our health. If we break a bone in one of our legs, we have trouble walking; if we lose sight in both our eyes, we can no longer see. Slow changes, such as the growth of our hair and our nails, are fine and even normal, but sudden changes like those just described are obviously troublesome. By analogy, sudden and rapid changes in society and its social institutions are troublesome according to the functionalist perspective. If the human body evolved to its present form and functions because these made sense from an evolutionary perspective, so did society evolve to its present form and functions because these made sense. Any sudden change in society thus threatens its stability and future.

As these comments might suggest, functionalism views social problems as arising from society’s natural evolution. When a social problem does occur, it might threaten a society’s stability, but it does not mean that fundamental flaws in the society exist. Accordingly, gradual social reform should be all that is needed to address the social problem.

Functionalism even suggests that social problems must be functional in some ways for society, because otherwise these problems would not continue. This is certainly a controversial suggestion, but it is true that many social problems do serve important functions for our society. For example, crime is a major social problem, but it is also good for the economy because it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs in law enforcement, courts and corrections, home security, and other sectors of the economy whose major role is to deal with crime. If crime disappeared, many people would be out of work! Similarly, poverty is also a major social problem, but one function that poverty serves is that poor people do jobs that otherwise might not get done because other people would not want to do them (Gans, 1972). Like crime, poverty also provides employment for people across the nation, such as those who work in social service agencies that help poor people.

Conflict Theory

In many ways, conflict theory is the opposite of functionalism but ironically also grew out of the Industrial Revolution, thanks largely to Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Whereas conservative intellectuals feared the mass violence resulting from industrialization, Marx and Engels deplored the conditions they felt were responsible for the mass violence and the capitalist society they felt was responsible for these conditions. Instead of fearing the breakdown of social order that mass violence represented, they felt that revolutionary violence was needed to eliminate capitalism and the poverty and misery they saw as its inevitable results (Marx, 1906; Marx & Engels, 1962).

According to Marx and Engels, every society is divided into two classes based on the ownership of the means of production (tools, factories, and the like). In a capitalist society, the bourgeoisie , or ruling class, owns the means of production, while the proletariat , or working class, does not own the means of production and instead is oppressed and exploited by the bourgeoisie. This difference creates an automatic conflict of interests between the two groups. Simply put, the bourgeoisie is interested in maintaining its position at the top of society, while the proletariat’s interest lies in rising up from the bottom and overthrowing the bourgeoisie to create an egalitarian society.

In a capitalist society, Marx and Engels wrote, revolution is inevitable because of structural contradictions arising from the very nature of capitalism. Because profit is the main goal of capitalism, the bourgeoisie’s interest lies in maximizing profit. To do so, capitalists try to keep wages as low as possible and to spend as little money as possible on working conditions. This central fact of capitalism, said Marx and Engels, eventually prompts the rise of class consciousness, or an awareness of the reasons for their oppression, among workers. Their class consciousness in turn leads them to revolt against the bourgeoisie to eliminate the oppression and exploitation they suffer.

Marx and Engels’ view of conflict arising from unequal positions held by members of society lies at the heart of today’s conflict theory. This theory emphasizes that different groups in society have different interests stemming from their different social positions. These different interests in turn lead to different views on important social issues. Some versions of the theory root conflict in divisions based on race and ethnicity, gender, and other such differences, while other versions follow Marx and Engels in seeing conflict arising out of different positions in the economic structure. In general, however, conflict theory emphasizes that the various parts of society contribute to ongoing inequality, whereas functionalist theory, as we have seen, stresses that they contribute to the ongoing stability of society. Thus while functionalist theory emphasizes the benefits of the various parts of society for ongoing social stability, conflict theory favors social change to reduce inequality.

1.2.1.jpg

Feminist theory has developed in sociology and other disciplines since the 1970s and for our purposes will be considered a specific application of conflict theory. In this case, the conflict concerns gender inequality rather than the class inequality emphasized by Marx and Engels. Although many variations of feminist theory exist, they all emphasize that society is filled with gender inequality such that women are the subordinate sex in many dimensions of social, political, and economic life (Lorber, 2010). Liberal feminists view gender inequality as arising out of gender differences in socialization, while Marxist feminists say that this inequality is a result of the rise of capitalism, which made women dependent on men for economic support. On the other hand, radical feminists view gender inequality as present in all societies, not just capitalist ones. Several chapters in this book emphasize the perspectives of feminist sociologists and other social scientists.

Conflict theory in its various forms views social problems as arising from society’s inherent inequality. Depending on which version of conflict theory is being considered, the inequality contributing to social problems is based on social class, race and ethnicity, gender, or some other dimension of society’s hierarchy. Because any of these inequalities represents a fundamental flaw in society, conflict theory assumes that fundamental social change is needed to address society’s many social problems.

Symbolic Interactionism

Symbolic interactionism focuses on the interaction of individuals and on how they interpret their interaction. Its roots lie in the work of early 1900s American sociologists, social psychologists, and philosophers who were interested in human consciousness and action. Herbert Blumer (1969) (Blumer, 1969), a sociologist at the University of Chicago, built on their writings to develop symbolic interactionism, a term he coined. Drawing on Blumer’s work, symbolic interactionists feel that people do not merely learn the roles that society has set out for them; instead they construct these roles as they interact. As they interact, they negotiate their definitions of the situations in which they find themselves and socially construct the reality of these situations. In doing so, they rely heavily on symbols such as words and gestures to reach a shared understanding of their interaction.

1.2.2-1024x683.jpg

Symbolic interactionism focuses on individuals, such as the people conversing here. Sociologists favoring this approach examine how and why individuals interact and interpret the meanings of their interaction. (Wikimedia Commons – public domain.)

An example is the familiar symbol of shaking hands. In the United States and many other societies, shaking hands is a symbol of greeting and friendship. This simple act indicates that you are a nice, polite person with whom someone should feel comfortable. To reinforce this symbol’s importance for understanding a bit of interaction, consider a situation where someone refuses to shake hands. This action is usually intended as a sign of dislike or as an insult, and the other person interprets it as such. Their understanding of the situation and subsequent interaction will be very different from those arising from the more typical shaking of hands. As the term symbolic interactionism implies, their understanding of this encounter arises from what they do when they interact and from their use and interpretation of the various symbols included in their interaction. According to symbolic interactionists, social order is possible because people learn what various symbols (such as shaking hands) mean and apply these meanings to different kinds of situations. If you visited a society where sticking your right hand out to greet someone was interpreted as a threatening gesture, you would quickly learn the value of common understandings of symbols.

Symbolic interactionism views social problems as arising from the interaction of individuals. This interaction matters in two important respects. First, socially problematic behaviors such as crime and drug use are often learned from our interaction with people who engage in these behaviors; we adopt their attitudes that justify committing these behaviors, and we learn any special techniques that might be needed to commit these behaviors. Second, we also learn our perceptions of a social problem from our interaction with other people, whose perceptions and beliefs influence our own perceptions and beliefs.

Because symbolic interactionism emphasizes the perception of social problems, it is closely aligned with the social constructionist view discussed earlier. Both perspectives emphasize the subjective nature of social problems. By doing so, they remind us that perceptions often matter at least as much as objective reality in determining whether a given condition or behavior rises to the level of a social problem and in the types of possible solutions that various parties might favor for a particular social problem.

Applying the Three Perspectives

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To help you further understand the different views of these three theoretical perspectives, let’s see what they would probably say about armed robbery , a very serious form of crime, while recognizing that the three perspectives together provide a more comprehensive understanding of armed robbery than any one perspective provides by itself.

A functionalist approach might suggest that armed robbery actually serves positive functions for society, such as the job-creating function mentioned earlier for crime in general. It would still think that efforts should be made to reduce armed robbery, but it would also assume that far-reaching changes in our society would be neither wise nor necessary as part of the effort to reduce crime.

Conflict theory would take a very different approach to understanding armed robbery. It might note that most street criminals are poor and thus emphasize that armed robbery is the result of the despair and frustration of living in poverty and facing a lack of jobs and other opportunities for economic and social success. The roots of street crime, from the perspective of conflict theory, thus lie in society at least as much as they lie in the individuals committing such crime. To reduce armed robbery and other street crime, conflict theory would advocate far-reaching changes in the economic structure of society.

For its part, symbolic interactionism would focus on how armed robbers make such decisions as when and where to rob someone and on how their interactions with other criminals reinforce their own criminal tendencies. It would also investigate how victims of armed robbery behave when confronted by a robber. To reduce armed robbery, it would advocate programs that reduce the opportunities for interaction among potential criminal offenders, for example, after-school programs that keep at-risk youths busy in “conventional” activities so that they have less time to spend with youths who might help them get into trouble.

Key Takeaways

  • According to C. Wright Mills, the sociological imagination involves the ability to recognize that private troubles are rooted in public issues and structural problems.
  • Functionalism emphasizes the importance of social institutions for social stability and implies that far-reaching social change will be socially harmful.
  • Conflict theory emphasizes social inequality and suggests that far-reaching social change is needed to achieve a just society.
  • Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the social meanings and understandings that individuals derive from their social interaction.

For Your Review

  • Select an example of a “private trouble” and explain how and why it may reflect a structural problem in society.
  • At this point in your study of social problems, which one of the three sociological theoretical perspectives sounds most appealing to you? Why?

How to Solve Problems in Society

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Exploring a Method for Solving Social Problems.

T here are soooo many problems in society that need to be fixed. It seems hopeless.

But surrendering, deciding it’s impossible, and standing by as the world continues to deteriorate is defeatist and counter-productive.

What choice do we have but to believe progress is possible?

Less Bad is dedicated to understanding the most important problems we’re facing as a society and finding ways to solve them .

Of course, “solving” or “fixing” the biggest problems we face is a long-term endeavor, without a clearly-defined endpoint. That’s why the site is called Less Bad. We’re dedicated to progress . Small improvements today that over time add up to real solutions. Baby steps to a better world.

Social problem-solving skill is like a muscle. The more you work it the stronger it gets. That applies to humans in general just like it does to society at large. We’ve got to work our “progress-making muscle” more while lowering the amount of counter-productive behavior that goes on. To put it simply, as a society we’ve got to do more good things and fewer bad things. It is that simple .

As things get better, as certain strategies are deployed and goals are met , momentum builds. Past successes build and reinforce themselves. Progress gets easier.

It sounds simple, and it is. But the question remains, how do we go about solving problems?

A Method for Solving Social Problems

The following explains a tried and true method of solving social problems using a structure, or framework. Having a framework in place makes understanding issues easier.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Let’s take a look at the six components:

Define the Problem

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

The first step is to clearly and specifically define what the problem is, and why it’s an issue that needs to be improved. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, “the problem should be defined as simply as possible, but not simpler.”

This link leads to a starting point for some of our most important problems:

Explore some of the top Problems We’re Facing >>

Identify the Causes

What is happening that is leading to the lousy outcome?

Incentives, cultural norms, inertia, social pressures, constraints,  ignorance, distortions,  distractions, misunderstanding, misinformation – all these and more result in the intractable, miserable societal problems causing so much suffering.

Identifying the underlying, fundamental causes is the first step to fixing a problem. In systems thinking this is called root cause analysis .

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” -Attributed to Albert Einstein

This link explores some of the causes of our current state:

Explore some of the Causes of Our Problems >>

Define the Goal

To solve a problem, you need to know what the ideal end-state looks like. A description of what the situation looks like once the problem is solved .

“If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” -Yogi Berra

In some cases, metrics are appropriate. In the business world, “SMART” goals are those that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

While it would be great if all our goals could be smart, the fact that the goal of “world peace” may not be achievable doesn’t mean it isn’t worth moving closer to.

For our purposes, a goal is an ideal state. If we could wave a magic wand, what would the “solution,” the end state, look like?

Here are some goals most people would like to see achieved:

Explore some Societal Goals >>

Identify Strategies

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

How can we make progress? What smaller steps move us closer to the goal?

Strategies are simpler, more manageable, and achievable aspects of the overall goal. Goals are usually big and complicated. Strategies give us a more useful starting point.

We will likely not know ahead of time what one strategy is the best way to achieve a goal, so it’s helpful to have at least three strategies that can “move the needle.”

In reality, when dealing with complex social problems these strategies are pretty difficult. In many cases, it might be necessary to create sub-strategies to carry out a larger strategy. 1 For example, one strategy to fix the problem of extreme division in America  is to reform the election process, which in turn requires fixing problems like gerrymandering , the primary process, the influence of money , reforming the media , etc.

Explore Strategies for fixing our Problems >>

Only when we have a solid (not perfect) understanding of these four elements does it make sense to do what is most important:

Take Action

All the research, thinking, and strategizing in the world doesn’t mean anything if we don’t take action. Taking action comes in many forms, and what is right for you depends on myriad factors. 

Understanding what already exists that can be built upon , finding partners, building communities , increasing awareness, getting involved in politics, volunteering, and donating money are all ways of taking action to solve problems in society.

Learn How to Take Action >>

Keep Improving

A bunch of people trying to find the missing puzzle piece

In terms of solutions for social problems, nothing is ever finished. There will always be aspects of society that could use improvement. But the hope is that we’re moving in the right direction. As we work through ways of solving social problems, it’s important to stop and make sure our actions are having a positive contribution.

Want to know how we’re making the world Less Bad?

Sign up for our newsletter to learn more.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Find Out How We Can Fix All the Problems – Learn More >>

Why Is it Important to Solve Problems?

In the face of such overwhelming odds, it’s understandable that some people are questioning if it’s even worth it. Apathy is rampant in the country. But if we want to avoid massive conflicts in the future, or if we just want to alleviate suffering in the world at large, it’s important that as a society we make progress.

We must start solving some of our most pressing problems so that everyone can have an equal opportunity to succeed in life.

  • When society has a lot of problems it can hold people back from achieving their full potential .
  • Not only are people suffering, but the possibility of destabilization exists if enough people get mad enough.

Finding Real Solutions is Difficult

Social problem-solving skills are complex and multi-layered. There are a variety of social innovation solutions that have been proposed to try and fix them. But if we look around it’s easy to feel like we’re going backward instead of making progress.

We Need to Get At the Root Cause

Too often today, “solving social problems” only addresses the symptoms and not the root cause of the problem.

Government, nonprofits, and businesses throw resources at the problem without a full appreciation of the problem and the fundamental root causes. These half-assed, ill-conceived measures often only make things worse.

While addressing the symptoms can help assuage individual suffering (which is important), in the long term, addressing the fundamental cause is the only way to make meaningful change.

Take drug addiction. In the short term, a clean needle exchange can help decrease the spread of disease in vulnerable communities. But long term, addressing how and why people take drugs in the first place, while much more difficult, will have a more meaningful impact.

To truly achieve social problem solving we need to get to the heart of each problem and address the underlying root cause. Positive problem orientation leads to rational problem-solving skills that get better with practice.

What Are Some of Our Most Pressing Social Problems?

We all have things we don’t like. Here’s a whole page devoted to the biggest problems facing America . But just to give you an idea of the kinds of problems we’re defining, in no particular order here are some of the biggest societal problems we face:

  • Innocent people are dying for no reason.
  • War is leading to mass starvation.
  • The threat of Nuclear Armageddon is back!

Prices Soar Like the Noble Eagle

  • Health Care
  • Political Bribes
  • You name it

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Our police and legal systems are overwhelmed.
  • Mass shootings are commonplace.
  • It seems like we’re moving backwards.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • There are ONLY two sides.. And they HATE each other.
  • We’re heading toward another Civil War

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Irresponsible corporations pouring poison in the air
  • No fish in the ocean
  • Droughts and wildfires all over.

The Middle Class is Getting Squeezed

  • Less and more for the bottom
  • More and more for the top
  • Might not be sustainable

And if that’s not enough, here are some more:

  • The high cost of healthcare
  • Poverty and homelessness
  • Rising economic inequality
  • Gender and racial inequality
  • Unequal access to upward mobility
  • The influence of money on the government
  • The extreme division in the political arena
  • A media with the wrong incentives
  • Drug addiction
  • Federal spending and the budget and deficit
  • People have lost hope

See All the Problems >>

What are Some Ways to Solve Social Problems?

What are the solutions?

There are a variety of different approaches that can be taken to solve social problems.

  • Some people believe that the government should take care of social problems.
  • Others believe that it is the responsibility of individuals and community groups .
  • Other types think that new technologies , businesses, and corporations need to play a bigger role in problem-solving.

Clearly – the government won’t help

As covered above, the government has proven that it cannot get anything done. We can wish it were different but we’ve got to face reality. Until something changes (or many things really) we can only hope for very little action from the government (unless change means someone is making money from it). The powerful politicians that determine government priorities and their partners in the media are focused on driving division and enriching themselves and their allies, not helping solve our societal issues. The powers that be like the status quo just fine.

Nonprofit groups are overmatched

Nonprofit groups are great in theory, but they don’t have the resources. There are a lot of great nonprofit organizations out there with hard-working volunteers, employees, and skills. But they only have so much money, which unfortunately is all that really matters.

Businesses Have the Resources to Help

Less Bad thinks that business has the resources, and are in the best position, to affect social change. But we can’t force them to. It can’t be up to one person. It goes back to incentives. The challenge is to begin to align the goals of business with those of society at large.

Impact Consumerism is the idea of using the power in your wallet to form a coalition to encourage corporations to play a more active role in helping society. Here’s a link to a brief introduction to Impact Consumerism.

Voting at the Cash Register

Impact Consumerism >>

The point is to make progress. You can’t make progress if you don’t have an idea of where you want to get to.

There is a more comprehensive list of strategies to make the world better on the dedicated pages, but to give you an idea of some strategies to fix our social problems

Strategies for Solving Social Problems:

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Leverage scientific know-how not to make rich people richer, but to help us all.
  • Invest in cutting-edge technology and transform our society for the better.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Into the money they pay to get the laws they want passed.
  • The wages they pay the people at the bottom compared to the top.
  • Transparency into the poisons they put in the air and water. And into our food.

Wage Increase

  • Put workers first so that the middle class can thrive.
  • Reduce the extremes.
  • Educate and train employees so that they help themselves and the company at the same time.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Get hate mongers out of our lives
  • Reward honest, objective reporters out for the truth

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • And compromise.
  • Honest communication
  • And brotherly love.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • A comprehensive overhaul of our most destructive business processes
  • Where we don’t just burry shit in the ground, or throw it in the ocean

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • One where our leaders are focused on improving our lives.
  • Not raising money for their next campaign.
  • A government that lives up to the ideals enshrined in The Constitution.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Where everyone can see a good doctor that knows who they are and what’s in their best interest.
  • With good food

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Tone down the hate
  • Take the profit motive out of death and destruction
  • Redouble diplomatic efforts, and lead by example

There’s clearly no shortage of ideas for making progress, and many of these endeavors are being worked on very hard every day. It’s just a question of who has more resources. Those contributing to the common good, or those hurting it.

If the above isn’t enough, here are some more strategies to solve problems.

Strengthen Communities

Thriving communities are important for society. They help with everything. Stronger communities are critical to a happy and healthy life. Create opportunities for people to connect and engage with their neighbors. Whether it’s through block parties, education programs, or volunteering opportunities, when people come together, great things happen.

Increase Accountability

We need to increase accountability in both the government and in business. Too often people misbehave or act contrary to the common good. This type of behavior needs to be stopped, and the only way to do that is by increasing accountability. We need to ensure our politicians and corporations are working in our best interests.

Align Incentives

We need to align incentives so that businesses are rewarded for supporting societal goals. We want businesses to be profitable, but we also want them to help us reach our goals. Businesses should be motivated to do both.

Whistleblower Protection

Whistleblowers play an essential role in holding the powerful accountable. This not only helps to keep businesses and government agencies honest but also helps to create a more transparent marketplace. Whistleblower protection is not only good for society, but it’s also good for the economy.

Impact Consumerism

Impact Consumerism is a movement of individuals, businesses, and non-profits coming together to create social change through the power of the free market. Companies have the potential to be a force for good, and consumers have the power to drive this change. Impact Consumerism promotes a more sustainable and equitable future, one where businesses thrive by doing good.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Reduce the Influence of Money in Washington

Lobbyists spend billions of dollars every year trying to influence politicians. Big businesses and special interests have an outsized impact on the legislative process. Meanwhile, the average American has very little say in what goes on in our nation’s capital.

This needs to change. We need to get money out of Washington and put the power back in the hands of the people. We need to close the loopholes that allow corporations and the wealthy to skirt the rules. We need to increase transparency and regulation to make sure that our elected officials are working for us, not for money.

Redistribute Wealth

The gap between the rich and the poor is getting bigger and bigger, and it’s not sustainable. And the wealthy tend to do things to make sure they get even more money. Making rich people richer is not the best use of limited resources. We need to reverse this trend. We need to bring out a more balanced distribution of wealth and reduce the concentration at the top. Otherwise, we’re going to have a lot of problems.

What are the Fundamental Causes of Social Problems?

Root Cause Analysis

In systems theory, when attempting social problem-solving to make changes to the system you turn to root cause analysis as a way to fully understand the problem. As the problem is better understood, finding ways to improve the situation can be introduced.

The causes of the social issues are as numerous as the problems themselves. Dozens if not hundreds of forces are at play. But some causes have a much bigger impact on outcomes than others. In general, some of the more notable causes of the problems we collectively face include:

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Leaders on both sides don’t care about us.
  • They don’t care about our problems.
  • They care about scoring points,
  • And tweets.
  • Just take a look around!

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • You can have your profits, but can the middle class get some too?
  • We’re the ones doing all the work.
  • Do you really need to take EVERYTHING?

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Voting is not creating accountability.
  • The bulk of general elections are formalities.
  • The same people who got us in this position just stay in office forever.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • There’s something wrong when like 7 people have more money than the rest of the world combined.
  • And this wealth / income gap keeps widening.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Nothing in government gets done without a big sack of cash.
  • Promoting the lobbying culture is the only agenda with bipartisan support.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • We’re rewarding complexity and obfuscation, not healthy people.
  • The sicker we get, the more money they make.
  • We don’t even know what things cost!

The media - our top story tonight, the other side sucks

  • On both sides, they are not here to tell us the truth.
  • Their profit model depends on anger.
  • And Distractions.
  • And Division.

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • The waste and bureaucracy is STAGERING
  • The National Debt is THIRTY TRILLION DOLLARS
  • What does that even MEAN?

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Financial types make the most money, but they cause the most harm.
  • Credit card companies with gross margins of 80 percent.
  • Single Money Manager / CEO-type who makes A BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR.

More Causes of Social Problems

  • The incentives – Much of the current state of the world can be explained by incentives.
  • Lack of resources – We know what we want to see happen, but we don’t have what we need to affect that change. It goes back to incentives as well as the decisions those in power are making.
  • We only do things that can make a profit – Happiness, meaning, health, and good education are things we all want, but it’s difficult for a company to make a profit from them. So there’s not enough left for problem-solving. We need to take a serious look at the incentives and see what we can do to minimize the problem of only doing things that make money .
  • Government gridlock – It’s become all but impossible for the government to pass any kind of legislation that would improve. Some of the laws on the books are ancient, but there’s just not the political will to compromise for the good of the country. Gridlock in the political arena is a serious detriment to progress.
  • Extreme division – Perhaps the biggest cause of government gridlock is the extreme polarization in the country. Politicians that work with the other party are ostracized and can count on a challenge next election. And the media doesn’t help.

While those are some most powerful causes of the state of affairs, it’s not an exhaustive list by any means.

Explore more of the causes >>

So What Are the Goals?

There are a large number of ways to think about societal goals, but let’s start with a big one, and from there we can develop sub-goals.

Universal Happiness

Universal happiness across countries should be the idealized goal. Too many people are angry and have lost hope because they do not have what they need to be happy. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs , people need to have food and shelter first, then safety and security, then love and belonging, then esteem, and finally self-actualization. If people do not have their basic needs met, they will never be able to be truly happy.

Healthy People

  • Where we can all get the care we need
  • Without going bankrupt if the worst happens
  • Cut down on the diabetus

Strong Communities

  • Where we feel safe
  • Where we feel a part of the neighborhood
  • Where we get along with each other

Upward Mobility

  • Where hard-working employees share in the rewards
  • Competitive markets where anyone can succeed

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Where drought and forest fires don’t cause untold deaths
  • Sustainable ecosystems
  • With fish in the oceans
  • And air we can breath

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Leaders that unite us
  • Accountable leaders with our best interest at heart
  • Leaders able to make hard decisions that are for the best

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

  • Where they can reach their full potential
  • Where they can have all the things we don’t have today

Equal Access to Upward Mobility

The Constitution of the United States promises the pursuit of happiness for all Americans. But in today’s society where you were born and raised plays an outsized role in your education, the classes you attend, and what you can achieve in life. That’s not to say those born in less affluent circumstances can’t succeed, it’s just harder. This disparity is not only unfair, but it ultimately harms us all by preventing us from achieving our full potential as a nation.

Promoting access to upward mobility is a way to make many of the problems we face as a society better.

Feeling of Progress

We all want to feel like we are making a certain amount of progress toward our goals. When we see gridlock, it can seem like nothing is happening and that things are getting worse. However, it’s important to remember that progress is being made all around us. We may not always agree on the best process to achieve progress, but progress itself is something that we can all rally around.

Safety and security are important to everyone. We all want to feel safe in our homes, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Crime is bad for individuals, families, and businesses. That’s why it’s so important to take steps to reduce unemployment and crime and keep our streets safe.

World Peace / Peace on Earth

In a world that is increasingly interconnected, the need for world peace is more evident than ever. We won’t get there overnight but as we solve social problems we move just a bit closer. Although there will always be disagreements and conflicts between nations, the world has become more stable overall in recent years. This is due in part to the rise of international institutions and the increased cooperation between states. By continuing to work together on various subjects and supporting each other, we can create a model world that is more peaceful and prosperous for all.

A Healthy Planet

A healthy planet is necessary for a healthy environment, which is necessary for healthy human beings. We want to promote sustainability and a circular economy so that businesses are incentivized to protect the environment, not just pollute it. And we want to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere so that our planet can thrive for generations to come. Reach all our environmental goals .

Healthy People

We all know that health is important. It’s not just about looking good in that new swimsuit – although that is a nice perk. Being healthy means having more energy, being able to think more clearly, and reducing the costs of health care for everyone. A healthy society listens to medical professionals and embraces effective techniques and processes. We all benefit when most people can live long, happy, and healthy lives.

Thriving Communities

Thriving communities help solve problems. Stronger communities , where all children go to a good school, are critical to a happy and healthy life. Whether it’s through block parties, education programs, smaller classroom sizes, or volunteering opportunities, when people come together, great things happen.

Prosperous Middle Class

A thriving middle class is essential for the growth of any country. The middle class is the backbone of the economy, and its success directly impacts the process of problem-solving. A strong local community is an important process for the solution of any social problem. It’s created by following examples defined by ideas and processes.

When the middle class is doing well it benefits everyone in the country, as it increases purchasing power and lowers the cost of living. Similarly, when the middle class is thriving, businesses can grow and create new jobs. This leads to even more upward mobility and creates a vicious cycle of growth.

In today’s age of 24-hour news cycles and seemingly constant information overload, it can be difficult to know where to turn for real, honest news. With the proliferation of “fake news” and clickbait headlines, it’s more important than ever to be able to identify a source of news we can trust . We should expect journalism of the highest standards – accurate reporting, fair and balanced stories, and a commitment to transparency. It’s time to reform the media to make progress .

Reform the Media

Journalists should be asking hard questions, not driving division.

Productive Government

A functioning government works for the people it represents. When the government functions properly, it leads to things like happiness, meaning, and better use of tax dollars. All people want the government to function to make progress. Gridlock and polarization are bad because they prevent the government from working. Politicians campaign on promises, but often do not follow through on them. This gridlock and polarization need to be fixed for the government to function properly again.

Helpful Private Sector

We need a business community that supports our societal goals. Unfortunately, we often see businesses whose only goal is to make a profit, without any regard for the broader implications of their actions. We need to align incentives so businesses are rewarded for supporting societal goals, rather than just maximizing profits. A labor market that offers family-supporting jobs to people of all backgrounds and aptitudes. We need a business community on the side of progress .

Competitive Marketplaces

A Competitive Marketplace is good for consumers because it drives down prices. When businesses compete against each other, it forces them to keep their prices low to attract and keep customers. In addition, a Competitive Marketplace provides consumers with more choices.

“Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved.” -William Jennings Bryan

We Can Make Things Less Bad

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Some social problems can seem overwhelming. But remember that even the most complex problem can be solved if we work together, focus on what matters, and are willing to find innovative solutions.

Given the enormous challenges, it’s easy to despair. But non-stop complaining and giving up hope is certainly not going to help us solve problems.

If we are going to avoid a societal breakdown , we need to do a better job of addressing our most pressing issues.

So that’s what I’m doing on this site—exploring the problems and causes and proposing goals and strategies to reach them across the four core groupings ( Environment , Business , Government , and Society ). I believe that working through this problem-solving framework is the best way to fix so many of the aspects of society that are causing so much pain and frustration in the world.

Over the following weeks and months, the plan is to flesh these ideas out. The aim is to eventually have a browsable framework of the various issues affecting us, their causes, broad goals, and specific strategies.

And most importantly, organizing the various groups already working toward those goals.

It’s not gonna happen overnight, and a lot of help is needed. But I think it’s the best hope we have of improving society.

I hope you’ll join the ride.

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how traditional path can help to solve social problems

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Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, Fall 2020

In the Realm of the Barely Feasible

By Arati Prabhakar

Complex challenges facing the nation require a new approach to ramping up innovation: solutions R&D.

Science, the Endless Frontier

What would the Vannevar Bush of 1945 make of 2020? He could beam with justifiable pride in having paved the way for an information revolution, an eightfold growth in real gross domestic product, diseases cured, and a Cold War ended. Seeing the current pandemic , he would be perplexed that the nation’s response looks devastatingly like the one he would have experienced in 1918. Seeing protests, he might grieve to learn that Black intergenerational mobility is as poor as it was when he was born in 1890. He would be astonished to see the scale of disinformation campaigns manipulating our worst instincts to sow division. And he would be confounded by the nation’s weak response to the massive problem of climate change.

Just as World War II was ending, Vannevar Bush wrote Science, the Endless Frontier , and it remains the touchstone for federal support of research and the frame we use to explain its social value. Starting with national purposes and national needs, he wrote of the goal of improving health and longevity. He wrote about maintaining military preparedness even in peacetime. And most poignantly, after the Depression and years of combat, with millions of GIs about to come home, he wrote, “One of our hopes is that after the war there will be full employment, and that the production of goods and services will serve to raise our standard of living.” Then Bush identified a gap in American innovation that called for a new way of working to help achieve these ambitions: robust basic research, conducted at universities, and supported by the federal government.

It was a time when the nation’s GDP was over half of the world’s total production, as much of the rest of the world was buried under the rubble of war. It was a time when manufacturing and agriculture were the backbone of our economy. It was a time before the first artificial satellite, before the transistor, before we knew that DNA is a double helix.

The challenges of a new era

I reread Endless Frontier in 2017 as I was concluding my term as director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. It brought home the fact that the contributions I’d gotten to make over 30 years in public agencies and private companies were all in the context of an exceptional American innovation system that grew in the wake of that document. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the ways in which our country’s challenges differed from those that Bush described in July 1945. His trio of economic growth, health, and national security will always be essential challenges for the United States, but today they must be understood and addressed in new ways. Economic growth has brought with it a damaging growth in inequality and further entrenched racial inequity. We have focused intently on biomedicine but not on preventing illness and maintaining good health across our whole population, again reinforcing unacceptable inequities. Major security threats change at a much faster pace and go beyond the need to deliver firepower on target, now encompassing threats of cyber attacks, biological weapons, and disinformation. And we face new challenges unknown in Bush’s time. Climate change’s devastations have only started, and the job ahead to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions is immense. The Information Age has brought with its marvels an array of inadvertent and dangerous consequences, including privacy erosion and threats to our democracy.

Inspired by Endless Frontier , a broad set of organizations, incentives, and relationships evolved after World War II. To meet the challenges we now face, we need a generational advance in our innovation ecosystem with new methods, new participants, and new incentives.

By hard problems, I mean hard. Our four focus areas are: data and information we can trust, robust population health, opportunity for every person, and mitigating climate change.

DARPA gave me one of the world’s great perches for scanning the research horizon, and, with Endless Frontier in mind, I was mulling over what new ideas might be brought to the challenges ahead. That was the start of a journey that led to founding Actuate in 2019 with fellow DARPA alumnus Wade Shen. Actuate is a new nonprofit organization to conduct what we call “solutions R&D” programs. We want to accelerate the development of new forms of innovation by prototyping them. Our work will be to design and run programs that do two things: demonstrate specific new breakthrough solutions for society’s hard problems, and demonstrate what an effective innovation model can look like in these areas. And by hard problems, I mean hard. Our four focus areas are: data and information we can trust, robust population health, opportunity for every person, and mitigating climate change.

It takes an ecosystem

The story line of the transformations resulting from Science, the Endless Frontier is generally about curiosity-driven basic research leading to insights that are then commercialized.

Curiosity is indeed one part of the story. Here’s an example. Every time the blue GPS dot blinks on the map on my phone, I think about a couple of young researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. During the excitement and panic of Sputnik, these two lugged their radio gear up to a rooftop where they listened to the Doppler shift from that first satellite that humans had ever flung into orbit. The basic insight about a new means for geolocation grew from that seminal moment.

But our two heroes are only part of the GPS story. Ideas form in a context, and in 1957 that context was a mix of geopolitics, institutional arrangements, and technologies. The prior decade’s world war had cemented a new relationship between academia and the national security enterprise, including Defense Department support for the Applied Physics Lab. Communications, precision timekeeping, and radio frequency engineering were racing forward, and satellite technology joined the list of burgeoning fields at that very moment. The collision of these technologies was opening a multitude of new opportunities in that period, and revealing many new phenomena to be curious about. The Cold War added a sense of existential urgency that encouraged bold experimentation.

And that’s just the start. Taking GPS from a kernel of insight to ubiquity took billions of dollars and decades of investment by the Defense Department to engineer and then deploy an extraordinarily sophisticated system of satellites packed with precision technologies. It took the application of the theory of general relativity to correct for the shift in timekeeping by atomic clocks on a distant orbit. It took two presidential orders that opened GPS signals to public use. And it took companies and entrepreneurs and investors to put GPS receivers into ships, planes, trucks, tractors, cars, computers, and eventually phones. It takes nothing away from those two radio researchers, or from Einstein for that matter, to understand and acknowledge that all of this was needed for those little blue dots to appear on our maps.

Advanced materials, new energy technologies, medical therapies, integrated circuits, the internet, wireless and mobile technologies, data science and artificial intelligence—each new technology has its own unique story of how it germinated, grew, blossomed, and spread. But the technologies that surround us share this characteristic: every one of them was the result of our complex, convoluted, robust research and development ecosystem. Each one required basic research, playing out among emerging fields of inquiry; product development and commercialization; and policies and public support to encourage its development, initiate its adoption, and navigate its unwanted consequences. Each required an interplay among researchers, producers, investors, policy-makers, and customers; each reflects the interplay of R&D with markets and societal needs.

Yet we lack a systematic understanding of how to nurture the sort of rich ecosystem we need to confront the societal challenges facing us now. Over 75 years, the federal government has dramatically increased its support of research, and universities and national labs have built layers of incentives and deep culture for their research role. Companies have honed their ability to develop products and markets, shifting away from doing their own fundamental research in established industries. American venture capital and entrepreneurship have supercharged the start-up pathway for commercialization in some sectors. But we haven’t yet put enough energy into understanding the bigger space where policy, finance, and the market meet to scale component ideas into the kind of deep and wide innovations that can solve big, previously intractable problems in society.

We lack a systematic understanding of how to nurture the sort of rich ecosystem we need to confront the societal challenges facing us now.

These sorts of problems aren’t aligned to tangible market opportunities or to the missions of established government R&D organizations today. The philanthropic sector can play a pivotal role by taking the early risk of trying new methods for R&D and developing initial examples that governments and markets can then adopt and ramp up.

The hypothesis behind Actuate is that solutions R&D can be the starting place for catalyzing this necessary change in the nation’s innovation ecosystem. Solutions R&D weaves the threads of research from multiple domains together with lessons from the reality of use and practice, to demonstrate prototypes, develop tools, and build convincing evidence. Because it reaches into and connects all the parts of the innovation system, solutions R&D is a powerful way to ratchet the whole system up faster, once some initial elements of research and implementation are in place. Doing it well takes a management approach that combines a relentless focus on a bold goal with the ability to manage the high risk involved in creative experimentation.

Doing it well also changes minds about what’s possible.

DARPA, empowered

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has been doing solutions R&D well for six decades. Its $3.5 billion annual budget is a small slice of federal R&D, but it has a tremendous track record of generating breakthroughs for defense and for the wider world. My colleagues in the Defense Department understood DARPA as the originator of stealth aircraft, precision strike, and long-duration unmanned aerial vehicles. In the Silicon Valley part of my life, I found the tech community saw DARPA as the place that seeded multiple waves of artificial intelligence, a host of advanced semiconductor technologies, and—of course—the ARPAnet and the internet. DARPA programs across these areas drew on basic research supported by other agencies such as the National Science Foundation, which pumped more funding in as that research’s potential was revealed. And as DARPA’s programs showed what was possible, they catalyzed massive other investments, public and private, that led to the systems, products, industries, policies, and practices that ultimately changed how our military fights and how people around the world live and work. This is how solutions R&D can stimulate the much wider innovation system—so that it ultimately changes the future.

Solutions R&D weaves the threads of research from multiple domains together with lessons from the reality of use and practice, to demonstrate prototypes, develop tools, and build convincing evidence.

During my time leading DARPA, this track record was our benchmark for impact as we built a portfolio of hundreds of programs that drew from fields as diverse as space science and anthropology, cyber-physical systems engineering and synthetic biology, electromagnetics and advanced math. Time will tell if that work meets our high aspirations. Early signs are promising. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey now monitors radiological and nuclear threats continuously and robustly across a wide region by using our system of networked sensors. The military services are starting to shift to the flexible new architectures we designed to outpace adversaries and upturn our own sclerotic process built around monolithic defense systems. Start-ups are commercializing automated tools and processors developed in our programs to bring the revelations of machine learning to whole new classes of problems. And the first new vaccines and monoclonal antibodies to enter clinical trials for COVID-19 came from our programs that aimed to shrink the time to solutions from years to months.

DARPA’s historic track record has also made it a model of government-sponsored innovation. Behind every call for “an ARPA for X” (where, in recent years, X = energy, intelligence, health, agriculture, Japan, Europe, or Britain) is a yearning for R&D that throws open new doors to solutions. Not every attempt succeeds. But ARPA-E for energy and IARPA for intelligence are now underway, and they are fulfilling the promise of delivering fresh and important advances by applying the key elements of the DARPA model in other fields.

Inspired by the experiences and lessons of DARPA, Actuate is adapting that approach to a different set of societal challenges. This isn’t a copy-and-paste exercise. We’re going to the heart of the DARPA model to figure out how that can be brought to life in very different contexts. As with any complex, dynamic system, the whole is greater than its elements. Many elements have been extensively studied, and one consistent observation in particular matches my experiences in the agency. The core of the DARPA model is a “head in the stars, feet on the ground” program manager, empowered to design and run a focused program with the potential for high impact.

Empowered program managers start by understanding the systems context in their area and looking for leverage points—places where a new approach could lead to a broader change. They define a bold goal. It must be in the realm of the feasible, but perhaps only barely so. Indeed, “barely in the realm of the feasible” is what keeps others from trying it. They design the program to rigorously wring out risks. They then run the program by tapping exceptional talents in all kinds of companies, universities, and other organizations.

A successful program ends with three results: a convincing demonstration of the program’s breakthrough goal; a community of researchers and technologists who are imbued with the program’s vision, have shown it to be possible, and are able to move it forward; and decision-makers ready to fund and implement the results with product development or other action so that it can ultimately achieve full scale and impact.

Over time, with resources and room to run, a solutions R&D organization can create a culture in which every participant runs to work in the morning to change what’s possible—and then does exactly that.

With Actuate, we seek to bring this model back to the realm of philanthropy to start building the capacity to tackle very different kinds of societal needs—enabling government and the market to adopt it and scale it up.

The empowered expert program manager approach for solutions R&D traces back to before World War II, when the Rockefeller Foundation developed it to create the advances that would become the Green Revolution. During the war, that management model was imported by the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by none other than Vannevar Bush, to manage programs developing radar, the proximity fuze, and the atomic bomb. After the war, the empowered management model was adopted by the Office of Naval Research, and then by DARPA when it started in 1958. With Actuate, we seek to bring this model back to the realm of philanthropy to start building the capacity to tackle very different kinds of societal needs—enabling government and the market to adopt it and scale it up.

The revolution in three parts

Why do we believe that a solutions R&D approach can be applied to our vexing societal challenges today? Progress often comes from the confluence of hard problems and new ideas that can lead to solutions. Revolutions in the physical sciences, in biology, in engineering, and in math and computer science gave birth to the breakthroughs that changed the face of our economy, our security, and our health in the last century in ways previously unimaginable. That story is far from done.

Today, a revolution is just starting to emerge as information technology pervades every field of inquiry and action. It’s changing our thinking about complex systems, and it’s especially powerful across the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. This new revolution has three parts.

The first is well known: abundant data and the tools to understand it. We now have voluminous data about people and organizations—sometimes noisy and messy, but phenomenally valuable in its sheer quantity and freshness. We also have deeper and richer data than ever before about physical and natural systems: chemical processes, electric grids, crops, oceans. In parallel, data science and artificial intelligence tools let us analyze these masses of data and extract patterns for a seemingly endless fountain of correlations.

The second is perhaps less visible: the ability to model complex systems and to reason about underlying causes. Such models capture the interactions and feedback loops that characterize every interesting problem, allowing us to further deepen our understanding of the conditions under which certain outcomes occur. This is how scientific understanding grows—and it’s also how we explore the path from evidence under one set of circumstances to broadly applicable solutions.

The third applies to problems that directly involve a wide population of individuals: the ability to reach billions of people in individualized, personalized, interactive ways through devices carried in their pockets.

Voluminous data, reasoning about complex systems, personalized interactions at scale. These are exciting new capabilities that let us experiment, learn, iterate, and improve our capacity to intervene in addressing complex societal problems in ways we could barely have imagined in the past. This capacity does not offer an instant solution to all the problems of the world. But it can shift the boundaries so that some of our intractable problems become tractable.

New hope for hard problems

At Actuate, the four challenges we have chosen to pursue are critical to the future success of our society. Each is the sum of many component problems that may seem beyond reach today. Yet new ideas, methods, and tools now make it possible to form and test fresh hypotheses with the potential to crack open new solutions.

Data and information we can trust. The information revolution germinated from utopian dreams of empowerment and connectivity. But today, even as we reap its wonderful benefits, serious problems of privacy and trust are undermining democracies and limiting the full potential still to be gained from the information transformation.

One great paradox of the information age is that personal information is the most valuable data for addressing societal problems and simultaneously the most dangerous data for individual privacy. Within banks of data are insights about how to better educate our children, avoid the diseases that loom ahead for millions, reduce crime and incarceration, improve public services, and much more—but also how to facilitate political persecution, insurance discrimination, identity theft, and much more. Protecting privacy protects democracy and individual freedoms, but it prevents the use of data that can help solve societal challenges.

Because abundant data is a cornerstone of the next generation of solutions R&D, solving the data-privacy problem is itself a foundational solutions R&D problem. That’s why it’s one of the first programs that Actuate is developing.

Serious problems of privacy and trust are undermining democracies and limiting the full potential still to be gained from the information transformation.

An array of new technologies is just starting to make it feasible to ease the tension between data and privacy. Using data for computation while it’s still safely encrypted is now possible. The field of differential privacy has developed methods to track privacy leakage. New techniques can allow researchers to clean and link multiple datasets without having to see the raw data. These emerging approaches require highly specialized technical expertise today, and we can’t yet combine them to yield privacy-preserving computations at a practical cost and speed across a wide range of uses.

Actuate is developing a program called DataSafes to research and demonstrate a data sharing system that allows multiple data owners to maintain privacy guarantees during the entire cycle of statistical analysis, from data cleaning and linkage, to model discovery, to generating results from those models.

If successful, this new framework would make personal data analyzable and private at the same time. It would allow individuals, companies, and agencies to provide access to more and more valuable data with confidence that it will remain private while helping to solve major challenges.

Robust population health. The United States outstrips every other nation on per capita health spending, and yet dozens of other countries have lower infant mortality rates and longer life expectancy. Although the nation spends $3.5 trillion annually on health, less than 3% of these funds support public health, which focuses on prevention and the overall health of our population. Our weakened public health systems are scrambling to try to contain infections and deaths during the current pandemic, leading to a stunted economy that’s thrown tens of millions out of work. Other countries show that this doesn’t have to be the case.

Coaching for healthy habits is the most effective way to prevent the onset of diabetes for those at risk. Yet coaching is expensive, insurance coverage is limited, and doctors rarely prescribe it.

We will need a vigorous renewal of population health—distinct from biomedicine—if we are to overturn this dismal situation. Here’s one specific example of a role that solutions R&D can play. We’ve had solid proof for nearly 20 years that coaching for healthy habits is the most effective way to prevent the onset of diabetes for those at risk. Yet coaching is expensive, insurance coverage is limited, and doctors rarely prescribe it. A bit of progress has been made, but the problem remains: fewer than one percent of Americans at risk of diabetes are in an evidence-based coaching program. Over 30 million Americans afflicted with diabetes, another 88 million at risk, higher rates for Black and Hispanic populations, millions of cases of cardiovascular disease and cancers also preventable with healthy habits: such numbers tell us the true scale of this missed opportunity in illness, death, inequity, and financial costs.

Today, behavioral research, data, and machine learning could be combined to create a radically better personalized coaching system. It would start with a secure data system on a smartphone that puts control directly in each person’s hands. It would provide them with a realistic assessment of day-to-day activities and eating patterns from smartphone sensors and linguistic analyses of texts. It would provide on-the-spot incentives to make good choices, offering the potential to be even more effective than previous coaching approaches. And it could do so at a fraction of the cost of coaching by trained specialists.

The work ahead is risky—now just barely feasible. But if an R&D program can develop and prove this kind of solution in trials with many different people at risk of diabetes, it can help change the course of our chronic disease crisis.

Opportunity for every person . Financial mobility has stalled for many people and inequality has grown to a breaking point. College graduates have tripled their wealth over the past four decades, but the assets of those without college degrees have stagnated. Racial inequity is a longstanding, embedded factor. A recent study of intergenerational mobility across 12 decades found that “the headwinds black men have faced are race-specific in the sense that whites from similarly disadvantaged backgrounds experienced greater upward mobility and higher average income in every cohort since 1880.”

An intergenerational lack of mobility is fundamentally inconsistent with the promise of America. And everyone loses out when only a relative few are able to live to their full potential and make their wholehearted contribution to our society’s future.

Everyone loses out when only a relative few are able to live to their full potential and make their wholehearted contribution to our society’s future.

Solutions R&D can help. Last year’s Nobel Prize in Economics went to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” They developed the practices of randomized controlled trials to learn what does and doesn’t work in education, health, and poverty alleviation, touching many millions of lives and changing development economics in the process.

Research efforts such as these are a hint of what’s to come. Social science is at an inflection point, for the first time capable of seeing in detail the multitude of factors, influences, and policies that interact to either improve or damage an individual’s opportunity in society. Data analyses such as the Opportunity Atlas created by Raj Chetty and colleagues reveal the fabric of inequality in astonishing and valuable ways. For example, this work shows that in virtually every zip code nationwide, even from well-to-do neighboring households with similar incomes, Black boys grow up to make less than white boys. From such analysis can come new hypotheses, new experiments with new ways to assess progress and outcomes, and new learning. Social science is ready to contribute to solutions in powerful new ways.

Mitigating climate change. To avoid the most calamitous consequences of a changing climate, we will need to eliminate or offset essentially all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This seems at first glance to be a fairly traditional challenge for R&D and innovation. Over the past decade or so, wind and solar electricity have scaled faster than most people predicted; they’re currently mitigating about 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and continuing to grow rapidly. But here’s the problem: getting to this point took many decades from the first lab results, the first products, and the first companies. This is a sobering reminder that we don’t yet know how to implement deep infrastructural change on a massive scale in a very few decades. Meeting this challenge will require new kinds of innovation.

Because greenhouse gas emissions come from virtually every kind of human activity and enterprise, we will need to scale up hundreds of different new technology solutions, in virtually every corner of the economy. Here, the stumbling blocks involve the details of manufacturing and supply chains, the new skills needed and the old jobs lost, finding sites for new installations, and the high cost of capital for a first-of-its-kind system. The mechanisms of the market play a big role in these areas, but the market moves only at the pace at which profits and returns can be generated. As with many earlier infrastructures that were essential to the future functioning of our society (railroads and electricity, for example), the public sector plays an essential role here too.

We don’t yet know how to implement deep infrastructural change on a massive scale in a very few decades. Meeting this challenge will require new kinds of innovation.

Solutions R&D can also help us deal with this complex systems challenge . We can learn from ongoing activities, understanding how to speed and expand them with the tools of applied economics, behavioral science, and policy research. What aspects of testbeds and demonstrations most help to reduce risks and ease the transition to real-world operations? If a state government accelerates local deployment of a new climate solution, can their methods work for the needs of a different region? What allows a market exchange to expand and function at large scales, and can those lessons be applied to an exchange for carbon credits? These kinds of questions can shape new hypotheses, experiments, and real-world learning that accelerate the scale-up process for decarbonization across the entire economy.

Across Actuate’s programs, we aim to do two things: show what specific fresh solutions can do, and show how solutions R&D can work. If we’re successful, our efforts can accelerate a generational advance across our innovation ecosystem—not just fuller solutions R&D but also the robust basic research and implementation to address different classes of problems. This is how we ratchet up the twenty-first century innovation ecosystem we need to address the deepest challenges facing the nation.

Ethics from the start

These are exciting times. Here we have the social and natural sciences converging with the information revolution, exhibiting all the signs of the birth of a new set of powerful technologies. And that makes this a good point to ask: what could possibly go wrong? It’s an essential question whenever we’re working on powerful technologies—of any kind.

Here we have the social and natural sciences converging with the information revolution, exhibiting all the signs of the birth of a new set of powerful technologies.

Look back again at GPS. Along with all its wonderful commercial applications have come new questions about privacy and who has the right to use your GPS data. In the Defense Department, GPS was a key enabler of the biggest strategic shift in military technology in the past half century: from mass to precision weaponry. On the plus side, we have dramatically reduced collateral damage, and our use of stealth and precision weapons in the first Gulf War quickly led to overwhelming victory. That has informed the technological and geopolitical ambitions of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea for 30 years. And at the same time, the ability to target individuals with extreme precision has made it easier for a series of presidents to select a strike option from among difficult choices.

It’s the old story, the bright and the dark implications of technological advances. Technology’s power can lift up our communities, our nation, and our world. That’s why we researchers and technologists do this work. This is our extraordinary privilege.

But those advances come only after ethical, smart choices are made. That means we also have some extraordinary responsibilities. One is to bring forth the clearest possible facts about our new technologies, seeing and explaining both their merits and pitfalls. Another is that the weighing of ethics has to start at the start. Even before we know if a technology will amount to anything, the many paths ahead need to factor into research choices: who could benefit, who might control it, can it ameliorate inequity or will it reinforce it? In some cases, we can build better steering mechanisms and brakes into a technology, making that a central design challenge in its own right. The DARPA Safe Genes program has the goal of making gene editing more controllable and even reversible in the event of bioterror or simply bio-error. In data privacy technologies such as those Actuate will use, R&D offers technological solutions that can help with difficult ethical choices.

At Actuate, we want to demonstrate how this mindset, woven into our programs, can be a central feature of a twenty-first century innovation ecosystem focused on societal challenges.

Panaceas are not around the corner. We are in no danger, now or ever, of understanding and solving all of the world’s complex problems—especially those involving the most complex elements of all: humans. But new opportunities for making real progress on essential, fundamental challenges are beginning to come into focus. And the resulting shifts in the boundary between tractable and intractable problems will be immensely consequential in improving the lives of many millions or even billions of people. The time to build the innovation ecosystem that can create those opportunities is now.

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Paths out of poverty: Social entrepreneurship and sustainable development

Xiaoyi zhang.

1 School of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Jilin University, Changchun, China

2 School of Economics and Management, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

3 Management School, Hainan University, Haikou, China

Associated Data

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Poverty reduction in rural areas is an important development goal concerned by the international community, but the traditional poverty-reduction methods have certain drawbacks. Social entrepreneurship, with its innovative way to solve social problems, has gradually become a new sustainable development path to solve rural poverty. Using the case study method, this paper analyzes the social entrepreneurship process of 9 enterprises and the process mechanism of solving the rural poverty problem based on the identification and development of social opportunities. Our analysis suggests that social entrepreneurship is the process of identification, development and realization of social opportunities. Multidimensional rural poverty creates different social opportunities, including social opportunities in social, economic and ecological poverty. Enterprises integrate farmers into their value chain to develop and realize social opportunities, which is a sustainable means of poverty alleviation. In theory, we propose a conceptual framework for the sustainable development of social entrepreneurship and enriches the research on the process of realizing social opportunities in social entrepreneurship. In practice, we provide a sustainable development ideas for rural areas.

Introduction

Rural poverty is the most prevalent type of human poverty in the world. Poverty alleviation in rural areas is a major global challenge. It is not only an economic issue but also a social issue related to inclusive development ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ). Traditional approaches to reducing rural poverty include government assistance, non-profit organization assistance, and corporate social responsibility. However, these approaches have problems, such as lack of capital, motivation and core competitiveness ( Doherty et al., 2014 ). Therefore, how to deal with the shortage of external assistance and economic development in rural areas is still the key to reducing rural poverty. As an innovative way to solve social problems, social entrepreneurship plays an important role in solving the lack of external support and economic development difficulties in rural areas ( Atahau et al., 2022 ).

Social entrepreneurship can integrate the efficiency, innovation and resources of traditional for-profit companies with the passion, values and mission of non-profit organizations, to identify and develop social opportunities based on social needs, thereby pursuing social, economic, and ecological values ( Zulfiqar et al., 2021 ; Koehne et al., 2022 ). Rural areas are generally considered as the ideal location in which to build and operate social enterprises. Poverty here includes social, economic and ecological aspects ( Khan et al., 2014 ; Liu et al., 2017 ), forming a variety of entrepreneurial opportunities ( Alvarez and Barney, 2014 ). Then, how to identify and develop social opportunities to alleviate rural poverty is a challenge for social entrepreneurship.

However, the existing literature does not answer the above questions well. First, the mechanism and output of social enterprises in rural poverty alleviation remain ambiguous. As a rapidly developing academic field, some scholars have gradually begun to pay attention to the definition, value orientation and wider role of social entrepreneurship in solving social problems ( Ranville and Barros, 2021 ). They argued that social entrepreneurship, which focuses on those at the bottom of the pyramid, is an effective way to address social problems such as poverty, uneven distribution of health resources and unemployment ( Galaskiewicz and Barringer, 2012 ; McMullen and Warnick, 2016 ). However, social entrepreneurship in a rural context remains mostly unexplored ( Steiner et al., 2021 ). Ghauri et al. (2014) found that social entrepreneurship is an effective way to eliminate poverty, but they were unable to clearly reveal its deep operating mechanism. Moreover, the sustainable way of solving problems by social entrepreneurship is worth exploring. Second, the types and realization processes of social opportunities in the context of rural poverty are still unclear. Opportunities have been widely discussed in the theoretical research of business entrepreneurship, but ignored in the field of social entrepreneurship ( Davidsson, 2015 ). Effective opportunity identification is the premise of entrepreneurship, and opportunity development is the source of organizational competitive advantage. However, the existing research lacks systematic research on social opportunities in the context of rural poverty, and does not take into account the particularity of social entrepreneurship.

This research is guided by the following research question: How does social entrepreneurship solve rural poverty from the perspective of social opportunity? In answering this question, through literature review, we theoretically clarify the research status of social entrepreneurship and social opportunities in rural context. Then, we use case study method to explore the little-understood context of the process of social entrepreneurship ( Yin, 2014 ). We analyze the process of identifying, developing and realizing the social opportunities of nine enterprises and reveal the mechanism of social entrepreneurship in the process of reducing rural poverty. In terms of identification of social opportunities, based on the sustainability theory, we refine the types of social opportunities from three dimensions: social poverty, economic poverty, and ecological poverty. In terms of the exploitation and realization of social opportunities, our study combines the value chain theory and explains the specific role of social entrepreneurship in rural poverty by revealing farmers’ value chain participation in the process of social entrepreneurship and the compatible ways of achieving social, economic and ecological benefits. We then propose an effective sustainable development framework for social entrepreneurship to promote the rural economy.

Our research contributes to entrepreneurship literature in two important ways. First, we enrich the research of social entrepreneurship from process perspective, and provide effective ways for social entrepreneurship to solve the problems of rural poverty. Second, we systematically study the types and realization process of social opportunities, which plays an important role in promoting the boundary expansion of entrepreneurship theory.

Literature review

Rural poverty and social entrepreneurship.

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.

The role of social opportunity in social entrepreneurship

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.

Research design

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 ).

Case selection and collection

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 ).

Cases of rural social entrepreneurship.

Coding and analysis

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.

Data coding and analysis.

Explanation of core constructs

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:

Rural social opportunity

The rural social opportunity is the social opportunity in the rural context. The essence of social entrepreneurship is the process of identifying, exploiting and realizing social opportunities. With the rapid development of the global economy and the modernization of agriculture, rural development and construction have lagged far behind the demand for rural transformation, and social imbalances often coexist with unmet social needs.

There are still many poverty issues that have social, economic and ecological aspects ( Namara et al., 2010 ; Khan et al., 2014 ; Liu et al., 2017 ), including low population density, isolated communities, a lack of large town centers, and a lack of effective public transportation and sound infrastructure ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ). These provide a large number of development opportunities for social enterprises ( Littlewood and Holt, 2018 ; Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ). Moreover, opportunities for entrepreneurship may differ according to various issues ( Alvarez and Barney, 2014 ).

Drawing on the dimensions of rural poverty and multidimensional poverty assessment methods ( Bourguignon and Chakravarty, 2003 ; Khan et al., 2014 ), the research summarized three types of rural social opportunities in social, economic and ecological poverty, including job creation, education service, medical service, fair trade, low-price service, microcredit, ecological technology, ecological resource and ecological protection.

Value chain participation

The identification and development of opportunities seems to be related to the active participation of stakeholders and the mobilization of resources ( McDermott et al., 2018 ). Studies have shown that although the economic development in rural areas is terrible ( Pateman, 2011 ), when people believe that inequity is great or the pain is severe, they are more inclined to act quickly, and the resulting community cohesion has prompted a high level of trust and active citizen participation in rural communities. In the process of developing social opportunities, more and more social enterprises have developed a collaborative approach between service users and providers to meet existing challenges ( Boyle and Harris, 2009 ), including farmers in their enterprise value chains.

The enterprise value chain includes the process of obtaining raw materials from the original supplier until the final product is delivered to the user ( Shank and Govindarajan, 1993 ). The participation of farmers can be divided into three types: as suppliers participating in the enterprise’s procurement link, as employees participating in the manufacturing, marketing and service links, or as consumers of the enterprise.

First, social enterprises establish supply and marketing cooperative relationships with farmers, purchase their products directly, and build convenient, smooth, efficient, and stable circulation channels and docking platforms between the agricultural product market and the market ( Barrett et al., 2012 ) to return more income to farmers. Second, allowing social enterprises to participate in the manufacturing, marketing and service links means that farmers are included as employees in the workforce and thus can directly participate in the daily operations of the enterprise. This can reduce social isolation ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ) and promote the employment of rural surplus labor, which is obviously a win-win strategy. This requires companies to be able to transform their values from instrumentalists into values that include equality and social justice ( Tobin et al., 2016 ). Furthermore, in modern society it is no longer possible for farmers to be completely self-sufficient, and every aspect of life requires one to purchase goods and receive services from business operators. Social enterprises regard farmers as customers at the end of the value chain, provide farmers with better services, popularize technology, and disseminate knowledge to meet their urgent needs in terms of spiritual, material, and cultural aspects.

Sustainable social entrepreneurship

Social enterprise, which integrates the elements of business and charity ( Austin et al., 2006 ; Mair and Marti, 2006 ), is an ideal hybrid type of organization that combines aspects of multiple organizational forms. Therefore, the challenge for social enterprise is to balance their mixed goals, i.e., achieving sustainable commercial development, meeting the needs of “transactional” customers, and achieving social goals. With conflicting goals, hybrid enterprises may struggle to achieve financial sustainability, and research is called to reconcile these conflicting goals. According to the theory of sustainable development, sustainable rural social entrepreneurship should identify, develop and utilize opportunities to provide goods and services with social, economic and ecological benefits ( Belz and Binder, 2017 ). In particular, with regard to economic sustainability, enterprises have different sources of income, i.e., providing high-quality services, which can reduce their dependence on national funds and other donations, and it is more conducive to independent sustainable development.

Reliability and validity

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.

Identification, exploitation and realization of social opportunity

The process of identifying social opportunity, social opportunities in social poverty.

Rural social poverty is an unfair condition, a phenomenon caused by the imbalanced distribution of resources between urban and rural areas, low levels of farmers’ knowledge and skills, and loss of health ( Khan et al., 2014 ; Liu et al., 2017 ). In this situation, three types of social opportunities have been created: job creation, education service, and medical service.

Farmers are often socially excluded because of their low levels of education and lack of necessary skills ( Munoz and Steinerowski, 2012 ). This provides an educational service-oriented opportunity for social enterprises to realize the development of human capital for farmers and reduce the unequal opportunities stemming from differences in personal background and living conditions, so that all people can enjoy equal dignity and the ability to live ( Nussbaum, 2009 ). In addition, the community is always looking for new strategies and income sources, that is, developing new non-agricultural income-generating activities on their farms ( Alsos et al., 2011 ), hoping to increase local employment opportunities for young people and reduce their outward migration ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ). This provides social enterprises with job creation opportunities, replacing traditional charity subsidies with farmers finding work, allowing them to rely on their own labor force to obtain a secure income and realize their self-worth. Furthermore, disease is currently an important cause of rural poverty ( Liu et al., 2017 ), while rural towns and villages have limited (or no) basic medical services. Most rural medical problems involve a lack of chronic disease care, a shortage of health workers, the failure to adequately address prevention issues, a lack of infrastructure for comprehensive care, etc. ( Humphreys and Wakerman, 2008 ). Therefore, medical service-oriented social opportunities inspire social enterprises to provide farmers with affordable and high-quality medical services.

Social opportunities in economic poverty

Rural economic poverty usually means that farmers do not have a stable income and cannot meet their basic consumption needs. Poverty can be reduced by increasing agricultural income or reducing expenditures ( Banerjee et al., 2015 ; Koch, 2015 ). This creates three social opportunities for social entrepreneurship: fair trade, low-price service, and microcredit social opportunities. There are limited opportunities for agricultural products to enter the market ( Perez et al., 2013 ), and their purchase prices are volatile ( Dethier and Effenberger, 2012 ). However, farmers often lack the ability to cope optimally with agricultural production and trading activities. Fair trade opportunities encourage social enterprises to establish supply and marketing partnerships with the poor, provide vulnerable farmers with a stable and fair source of income, and protect them from market fluctuations. In addition, due to remote geographical locations and low consumption levels, rural commodity markets are small and fragmented, and middlemen are asking high prices from rural consumers, which often prevents rural households from obtaining enough product information ( Zaefarian et al., 2015 ) or buying the goods they need from a more competitive (low-price) market ( Vachani and Smith, 2008 ). There is a greater demand for affordable basic necessities and services in rural areas, which in turn provides social enterprises with low-price, service-oriented social opportunities. Furthermore, for rural families, limited funding is a key obstacle ( Duong and Izumida, 2002 ; Duong and Thanh, 2014 ). However, farmers are often excluded from the trajectory of financial institutions due to low pledges, high agricultural risks, the high lending costs of financial institutions, and low credit records, resulting in serious asymmetry between financial services and financial needs in rural areas. This offers a microcredit-type social opportunity to provide villagers with personal or commercial loans at a reasonable interest rate.

Social opportunities in ecological poverty

Poor natural conditions in rural areas ( Namara et al., 2010 ), coupled with an irrational use of resources, environmental pollution and other human activities, often lead to ecological poverty. This in turn gives rise to three types of social opportunities: ecological technology, ecological resource, and ecological protection.

First, rural areas lack technologies related to clean energy and waste disposal ( Chauhan and Saini, 2015 ). Eco-technological social opportunity requires enterprises to solve a series of rural problems scientifically and efficiently using advanced technological means. Second, one of the causes of rural poverty is the inadequate utilization of rural ecological and cultural resources. The diversification of traditional agriculture into non-agricultural enterprises is an important corporate strategy ( Dias et al., 2019 ). Relying on agricultural production, developing agricultural resources and the local culture by means of tourism is an effective means of sustainable agricultural development ( Gao and Wu, 2017 ), one that provides opportunities for social enterprises to develop ecological resources. Third, rural environmental pollution is one of the main problems hindering rural development. Pollution comes from waste discharged during agricultural production, such as livestock manure, plant straw, wood chips, straw, and residual pesticides ( Pindado and Sanchez, 2017 ). This serious problem provides social enterprises with opportunities for ecological protection, which can support the natural environment by protecting local land and fully protecting biodiversity ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ) to promote the application of a circular economy and sustainable agricultural development.

The process of exploitation and realization social opportunity

How does social entrepreneurship solve the problem of “social poverty”.

The problem of social poverty has created social opportunities for job creation, education services, and medical services. Taking Xingeng Workshop as an example, the founder realized that giving money could not permanently alleviate poverty. The company produces specialty handicrafts and brings farmers into the sales chain to obtain economic and social benefits. In addition, they create ecological value by recycling Tetra Pak packaging materials, recycling environmentally friendly products and conducting training courses on ecological education and rural development.

How does social entrepreneurship solve the problem of “economic poverty”?

The issue of economic poverty has led to fair trade, low-price service, and microcredit social opportunities. A typical example of identifying and exploiting low-price service-oriented social opportunities is Bancalimentos. The company created a circular economy, acquired organic waste and recyclable materials, sold them as raw materials to the local recycling industry, bought large quantities of food, medicines and other household items at economic returns, and sold them to villagers at affordable prices. As a result, they indirectly achieve the purpose of increasing the income of the poor while reducing environmental waste pollution.

How does social entrepreneurship solve the problem of “ecological poverty”?

The problem of ecological poverty gives rise to the social opportunities of ecological technology, ecological resource development and ecological protection. A typical example of identifying and developing ecological resource-development social opportunities is Njobvu Cultural Village Lodge. They hire local villagers to participate in the service link of the value chain and carry out interesting Malawian cultural activities. While enjoying high-quality accommodation services, tourists can observe traditional pastimes such as dancing, cooking, and basket weaving. Through this project, tourism development has provided a source of income for villagers and directly improved orphan care, local schools, clinics and bridges. It has also reduced poaching in Liwonde National Park, which encourages communities to protect this precious natural resource.

Through grounded theoretical analysis of 9 cases, the research explored the internal mechanism of social entrepreneurship to solve rural problems ( Figure 1 ); that is, by identifying and developing social opportunities, social enterprises include farmers in their value chains, allowing them to participate in the procurement, manufacturing, marketing and service or consumer’s links. This allows enterprises to create social value, economic value and ecological value in order to solve the problem of rural poverty.

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The internal mechanism of social entrepreneurship to solve rural problems.

In fact, the best way to help poor farmers is not to donate money, goods or other free assistance directly to them, as traditional poverty-alleviation subjects do, as this may generate spiritual poverty. In contrast, social enterprises use the means of integrating farmers into the entire social value chain to ensure that farmers can create social, economic, and ecological values with dignity through their labor and intelligence. In addition, the development of poverty-alleviation value chains as a poverty-reduction strategy can be used to counter the failure of institutions such as the government ( Thorpe, 2018 ). This is the best way to truly benefit the livelihood of small farmers.

Sustainable development framework for social entrepreneurship

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 ).

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Sustainable development framework for social entrepreneurship.

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 paper explores the contribution of social entrepreneurship to rural poverty alleviation from the perspective of social opportunity. We analyze the process of social entrepreneurship based on the identification, development and realization of social opportunities. We then summarize the types of social opportunities, the ways in which addressing rural poverty works, and the resulting social, economic and ecological outcomes.

First, our research enriches the social entrepreneurship theory from process perspective, clarifies the connotation of social opportunities and reveals the realization process of social opportunity and its special value in social entrepreneurship. Social opportunities arise from three types of poverty: social poverty, economic poverty, and ecological poverty. Based on these factors, we summarize nine typical social opportunities in rural poverty. There are human capital, property rights, and financial capital that can be exploited in different types of social opportunities. If entrepreneurs are unaware of the potential for value creation in various opportunities, their effectiveness in participating in poverty initiatives may be limited ( Alvarez and Barney, 2014 ). In terms of opportunity development and realization, we introduce the theory of enterprise value chain and believe that farmers’ participation in different value chain links is the primary means of realizing social opportunities. Companies can use their expertise to develop affordable products or services to address the unmet needs of the poor ( Zaefarian et al., 2015 ), or empower them by treating them as suppliers, producers or consumers of the company ( Boyle and Boguslaw, 2007 ). This finding highlights the importance of exploitation of social opportunities in the entrepreneurial process and also responds to the call of scholars to study opportunities in rural areas ( Tabares et al., 2022 ). Based on the value chain theory, we make the complex approach of poverty alleviation more actionable. In addition, we can clearly show that social entrepreneurship may have several goals when solving problems. For example, Xingeng Workshop has the dual goals of promoting farmers’ employment and protecting the rural ecological environment. Consistent with traditional entrepreneurial theory centered on opportunities ( Shane and Venkataraman, 2000 ; Zahra et al., 2008 ), we believe that the discovery and development of opportunities are crucial to any research work related to new business concepts, and we must find answers by studying entrepreneurial opportunities. However, we also believe that in the context of social entrepreneurship, opportunity is special valuable ( Zulfiqar et al., 2021 ), which determines that the core of social entrepreneurship is social value creation rather than economic value. Therefore, our findings extend the research paradigm of social entrepreneurship beyond the framework of business entrepreneurship, and we believe it can contribute to this emerging research field.

Second, we analyze the mechanism of social entrepreneurship to solve rural poverty, and fill in the research gap of rural context in the field of social entrepreneurship. Most entrepreneurship research has an urban focus ( Tabares et al., 2022 ), and the social entrepreneurship literature has also largely ignored rural entrepreneurial activities, especially in underdeveloped countries, where theoretical and empirical studies are still limited. Our study therefore focuses on the countryside and finds that rural social entrepreneurship plays a key role in alleviating extreme poverty. Social entrepreneurship can integrate both social and entrepreneurial dimensions, and social opportunity is the primary medium and focus of poverty. At the social level, one must focus on difficult social issues and grasp the urgent needs of people at the bottom of the pyramid ( Goyal et al., 2015 ). At the enterprise level, social enterprises must establish clear social goals (such as improving education and health, reducing social exclusion, etc.), engage in business activities in innovative ways, and maintain their operations by selling products or services ( Galaskiewicz and Barringer, 2012 ; McMullen and Warnick, 2016 ). These are two aspects of social enterprises’ sustainable solution to social problems. During the implementation process from the social to the enterprise level, social enterprises must begin by identifying social opportunities. By identifying and developing social opportunities, the social level and enterprise level can be combined to focus on specific rural poverty problems, so that solutions can be implemented and poverty problems solved. This double-sided research complements existing social entrepreneurship research and helps to further understand how social entrepreneurship is integrated with rural poverty or other social issues.

Third, we have constructed a sustainable development framework for social entrepreneurship aimed at helping to find a sustainable solution to rural poverty. From a sustainable livelihood perspective, the framework proposes a multi-dimensional measurement approach with the goal of improving the livelihoods of vulnerable individuals and communities in rural areas. We argue that sustainable livelihoods are multi-dimensional, as poverty can be manifested in many ways and affected by many factors, not just income ( Tabares et al., 2022 ). Therefore, social entrepreneurship needs to take into account social, economic and ecological benefits. Traditional poverty-reduction methods often assume that the poor cannot help themselves and need charity, and so direct public investment, subsidies, or other charities are used to meet unmet needs; however, this impact is often limited and short-term ( Austin et al., 2006 ). On the other hand, the market-based approach recognizes that poverty does not necessarily eliminate one’s participation in business and market transactions ( Zaefarian et al., 2015 ). In fact, in order to meet their basic needs, individuals must trade with cash or labor. Therefore, in rural areas, compared with other helping entities, social enterprises see farmers as suppliers, employers, and consumers, which seems to better help communities control and address complex social, economic, and environmental challenges ( Steiner and Teasdale, 2019 ). This can fill the gap between what the private sector is willing to produce and what the government and charity can provide, and it is an effective mechanism for creating value for (or with) farmers ( Saebi et al., 2019 ). This also helps to solve the triple failure problem of government, non-profit organizations and commercial enterprises, and fundamentally promotes the development of entrepreneurship theory.

Conclusion, implication and limitations

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.

Implication

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.

Limitations

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.

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

XZ: designing. YS and YG: writing. YD: method. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (21BGL074).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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2.4 Research Methods for Social Problems

Theories discuss the why of particular social problems. They begin to systematically explain, for example, why socioeconomic class is prevalent in industrialized societies, or why implicit bias is so common. But how do sociologists develop the theories in the first place or figure out if the theories are useful? For that, they must observe people interacting, and collect data. The ways in which social scientists collect, analyze, and understand research information are called research methods.

However, science isn’t the only way to understand the world. You may experience many more ways of knowing. When you consider why you know something, this knowledge may be based on different sources or experiences. You may know when the movie starts because a friend told you, or because you looked it up on Google. You may know that rain is currently falling because you feel it on your head. You may know that it is wrong to kill another person because it is a belief in your religious tradition or part of your own ethical understanding. You may know because you have a gut feeling that a situation is dangerous, or a choice is the right one. You may know that your friend will be late to class because past experience predicts it. Or, instead of the past, you can imagine the future, knowing that eating a hamburger will satisfy your hunger, just by seeing the picture on the menu. Finally, you may know something because the language you use supports you in noticing particular details. For example, how many ways can you describe the water that falls from the sky? People who live in Oregon, for instance, use several distinct words for rainy weather: drizzle, downpour, showers. Partly cloudy doesn’t change their plans, but they may throw a jacket in the car. In other regions, it may be more useful to describe snow or heat in great detail. The formation of language itself structures how you know something. The table in figure 2.23 organizes these ways of knowing.

Figure 2.23 Ways of Knowing and Examples

Each of these ways of knowing is useful, depending on the circumstances. For example, when my wife and I bought our house, we did research on home prices, home loans, and market value—reason. We talked about what home felt like to us—emotion. We walked through houses and pictured what life would look like in a particular house—imagination. Ultimately, when we drove down the cedar and fir-lined driveway, welcomed by the warm light through the window—sense perception—we turned to each other and said, “I hope this house is still for sale,” because we both knew we had found our home—intuition.

Of all of these ways of knowing, though, reason allows us to use logic and evidence to draw conclusions about what is true. Reason, as used in science, is unique among all of the ways of knowing because it allows us to propose an idea about how a social situation might work, observe the situation, and find out whether our idea is correct. Sociology is a unique scientific approach to understanding people. Let’s explore this more deeply.

As you saw in Chapter 1, sociology is the systematic study of society and social interactions to understand our social world. Although sages, leaders, philosophers, and other wisdom holders have asked what makes a good life throughout human history, sociology applies scientific principles to understanding human behavior.

Like anthropologists, psychologists, and other social scientists, sociologists collect and analyze data in order to draw conclusions about human behavior. Although these fields often overlap and complement each other, sociologists focus most on the interaction of people in groups, communities, institutions, and interrelated systems.

More simply, sociologists study society, a group of people who live in a defined geographic area, who interact with one another, and who share a common culture. Sociologists study human interactions at the smallest micro unit of how parents and children bond, to the widest macro lens of what causes war throughout recorded history. They explore microaggressions, those small moments of interaction that reinforce prejudice in small but powerful ways. They also study the generationally persistent systems of systemic inequality. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage and the climate crisis worsens, sociologists turn even greater attention to global and planetary systems to understand and explain our interdependence.

2.4.1 The Scientific Method

Scientists use shared approaches for figuring out how the social world works. The most common method is known as the scientific method , an established scholarly research process that involves asking a question, researching existing sources, forming a hypothesis, designing a data collection method, gathering data, and drawing conclusions. Often this method is shown as a straight line. Scientists proceed in an orderly fashion, executing one step after the next.

In reality, the scientific method is a circular process rather than a straight line, as shown in figure 2.24. The circle helps us to see that science is driven by curiosity and that learnings at each step move us to the next step, in ongoing loops. This model allows for the creativity and collaboration that is essential in how we actually create new scientific understandings. Let’s dive deeper!

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

Figure 2.24 The Scientific method as an ongoing process Figure 2.24 Image Description

2.4.1.1 Step 1: Identify a Social Issue/Find a Research Topic and Ask a Question

The first step of the scientific method is to ask a question, select a problem, and identify the specific area of interest. The topic should be narrow enough to study within a geographic location and time frame. “Are societies capable of sustained happiness?” would be too vague. The question should also be broad enough to be of significance. “What do personal hygiene habits reveal about the values of students at XYZ High School?” would be too narrow. Sociologists strive to frame questions that examine well-defined patterns and relationships.

2.4.1.2 Step 2: Review the Literature/Research Existing Sources

The next step researchers undertake is to conduct background research through a literature review, which is a review of any existing similar or related studies. A visit to the library, a thorough online search, and a survey of academic journals will uncover existing research about the topic of study. This step helps researchers gain a broad understanding of work previously conducted, identify gaps in understanding of the topic, and position their own research to build on prior knowledge. Researchers—including student researchers—are responsible for correctly citing existing sources they use in a study or that inform their work. While it is fine to borrow previously published material (as long as it enhances a unique viewpoint), it must be referenced properly.

To study crime, for example, a researcher might also sort through existing data from the court system, police database, and prison information. It’s important to examine this information in addition to existing research to determine how these resources might be used to fill holes in existing knowledge. Reviewing existing sources educates researchers and helps refine and improve a research study design.

2.4.1.3 Step 3: Formulate a Hypothesis

A hypothesis is a testable educated guess about predicted outcomes between two or more variables. In sociology, the hypothesis will often predict how one form of human behavior influences another. For example, a hypothesis might be in the form of an “if, then statement.” Let’s relate this to our topic of crime: If unemployment increases, then the crime rate will increase.

In scientific research, we formulate hypotheses to include an independent variable (IV) , which is the cause of the change, and a dependent variable (DV) , which is the effect , or thing that is changed. In the example above, unemployment is the independent variable and the crime rate is the dependent variable.

In a sociological study, the researcher would establish one form of human behavior as the independent variable and observe the influence it has on a dependent variable. How does gender (the independent variable) affect the rate of income (the dependent variable)? How does one’s religion (the independent variable) affect family size (the dependent variable)? How is social class (the dependent variable) affected by level of education (the independent variable)?

Figure 2.25 Examples of dependent and independent variables. Typically, the independent variable causes the dependent variable to change in some way.

Taking an example from figure 2.25, a researcher might hypothesize that teaching children proper hygiene (the independent variable) will boost their sense of self-esteem (the dependent variable). Note, however, this hypothesis can also work the other way around. A sociologist might predict that increasing a child’s sense of self-esteem (the independent variable) will increase or improve habits of hygiene (now the dependent variable). Identifying the independent and dependent variables is very important. As the hygiene example shows, simply identifying two related topics or variables is not enough. Their prospective relationship must be part of the hypothesis.

2.4.1.4 Step 4: Select a Research Method and Design a Study

Researchers select a research method that is appropriate to answer their research question in this step. Surveys, experiments, interviews, ethnography, and content analysis are just a few examples that researchers may use. You will learn more about these and other research methods later in this chapter. Typically your research question influences the type of methods that will be used.

2.4.1.5 Step 5: Collect Data

Next the researcher collects data. Depending on the research design (step 4), the researcher will begin the process of collecting information on their research topic. After all the data is gathered, the researcher will be able to systematically organize and analyze the data.

2.4.1.6 Step 6: Analyze the Data

After constructing the research design, sociologists collect, tabulate or categorize, and analyze data to formulate conclusions. If the analysis supports the hypothesis, researchers can discuss what this might mean. If the analysis does not support the hypothesis, researchers may consider repeating the study or think of ways to improve their procedure.

Even when results contradict a sociologist’s prediction of a study’s outcome, the results still contribute to sociological understanding. Sociologists analyze general patterns in response to a study, but they are equally interested in exceptions to patterns. In a study of education, for example, a researcher might predict that high school dropouts have a hard time finding rewarding careers. While many assume that the higher the education, the higher the salary and degree of career happiness, there are certainly exceptions. People with little education have had stunning careers, and people with advanced degrees have had trouble finding work. A sociologist prepares a hypothesis knowing that results may substantiate or contradict it.

2.4.1.7 Step 7: Report Findings

Researchers report their results at conferences and in academic journals. These results are then subjected to the scrutiny of other sociologists in the field. Before the conclusions of a study become widely accepted, the studies are often repeated in the same or different environments. In this way, sociological theories and knowledge develop as the relationships between social phenomena are established in broader contexts and different circumstances.

If you still aren’t quite sure about how sociologists use the scientific method, you might enjoy “ The Scientific Method: Steps, Examples, Tips, and Exercise [YouTube Video] ,” which explores why people smile. It also reminds us that people have been using logic and evidence to explore the world for centuries. The video credits Ibn al-Haytham , an eleventh-century Arab Muslim scholar with pioneering the modern scientific method in his study of light and vision (figure 2.26). If the video makes you curious about the science behind why people smile, you might want to check out this current research related to gender and smiling in this article, “ Women smile more than men, but differences disappear when they are in the same role, Yale researcher finds .”

Ibn al-Hayatham

Figure 2.26 Drawing of Ibn al-Hayatham

You might remember that in Chapter 1 , we talked about human society like a forest. We said that individual trees did not exist in isolation. Instead, they were interdependent. They formed a living community. The video in figure 2.27 describes the science behind this knowledge. Please watch at least the first 10 minutes to see if you can discover all the steps of the scientific method that Canadian female scientist Suzanne Simard used in her revolutionary science.

Figure 2.27 Suzanne Simard: How Trees Talk To Each Other [YouTube Video]

2.4.2 Interpretive Framework

You may have noticed that most of the early recognized sociologists in this chapter were White wealthy men. Often, they looked at economics, poverty, and industrialization as their topics. They were committed to using the scientific method. Although women like Harriet Martineau and Jane Addams examined a wide range of social problems and acted on their research, science, even social science, was considered a domain of men. Even in 2020, women are only less than 30% of the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) workforce in the United States (American Association of University Women 2020).

Feminist scientists challenge this exclusion, and the kinds of science it creates. Feminist scientists argue that women and non-binary people belong everywhere in science.They belong in the laboratories and scientific offices. They belong in deciding what topics to study, so that social problems of gendered violence or maternal health are studied also. They belong as participants in research, so that findings apply to people of all gender identities. They belong in applying the results to doing something about social problems. In other words:

Feminists have detailed the historically gendered participation in the practice of science—the marginalization or exclusion of women from the profession and how their contributions have disappeared when they have participated. Feminists have also noted how the sciences have been slow to study women’s lives, bodies, and experiences. Thus from both the perspectives of the agents—the creators of scientific knowledge—and from the perspectives of the subjects of knowledge—the topics and interests focused on—the sciences often have not served women satisfactorily. (Crasnow 2020)

See figure description

Figure 2.28 NASA “human computer” Katherine Johnson watches the premiere of Hidden Figures after a reception where she was honored along with other members of the segregated West Area Computers division of Langley Research Center.

You may have seen the movie Hidden Figures or read the book. In figure 2.28, Katherine Johnson, an African American mathematician, physicist, and space scientist, watches the premiere of the movie. In it, women, particularly Black women, were the computers for NASA, manually calculating all the math needed to launch and orbit rockets. However, politicians and leaders did not recognize their work. Even when they were creating equations and writing reports, women’s names didn’t go on the title pages.

The practice of science often excludes women and nonbinary people from leadership in research, research topics, and as research subjects. The feminist critque of the traditional scientific method, and other critiques around the process of doing traditional science created space for other frameworks to emerge.

One such framework is the interpretive framework. The interpretive framework is an approach that involves detailed understanding of a particular subject through observation or listening to people’s stories, not through hypothesis testing. Researchers try to understand social experiences from the point of view of the people who are experiencing them. They interview people or look at blogs, newspapers, or videos to discover what people say is happening, and how the people make sense of things. This in-depth understanding allows the researcher to create a new theory about human activity. The steps are similar to the scientific method, but not the same, as you see in figure 2.29.

See image description

Figure 2.29. Interpretive framework, Figure 2.29 I mage Description

White American researcher Brene Brown, who you will learn more about in Chapter 3 , describes the approach this way:

In grounded theory we don’t start with a problem or a hypothesis or a literature review, we start with a topic. We let the participants define the problem or their main concern about the topic, we develop a theory, and then we see how and where it fits in the literature. (Brown 2022)

In her own research she interviewed people who she considered resilient to understand how shame works. By listening to resilient people, she was able to develop a theory about how people recover from difficult situations in life. If you are interested in seeing her writing for yourself, check out this blog post on addressing social problems with the power of love: “ Doubling Down on Love .”

Even though both the traditional scientific method and the interpretive framework start with curiosity and questions, the people who practice science using the interpretive framework allow the data to tell its story. Using this method can lead to insightful and transformative results. You can find things you didn’t even know to expect, because you are listening to what the stories say.

2.4.3 Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods

In the video you saw in figure 2.20, Suzanne Simard describes the amazing science she does when she researches how trees talk to each other. The methods she uses, with the possible exception of bringing bear spray, don’t work very well when you study people. Instead social scientists use a variety of methods that allow them to explain and predict the social world. These research methods define how we do social science.

In this section, we examine some of the most common research methods. Research methods are often grouped into two categories: quantitative research , data collected in numerical form that can be counted and analyzed using statistics and qualitative research , non-numerical, descriptive data that is often subjective and based on what is experienced in a natural setting. These methods seem to contradict each other, but some of the strongest scientific studies combine both approaches. New research methods go beyond the two categories, exploring international and Indigenous knowledge, or doing research for the purpose of taking action.

2.4.3.1 Surveys

Do you strongly agree? Agree? Neither agree or disagree? Disagree? Strongly disagree? You’ve probably completed your fair share of surveys, if you’ve heard this before. At some point, most people in the United States respond to some type of survey. The 2020 U.S. Census is an excellent example of a large-scale survey intended to gather sociological data. Since 1790, the United States has conducted a survey consisting of six questions to receive demographic data of the residents who live in the United States.

As a research method, a survey collects data from subjects who respond to a series of questions about behaviors and opinions, often in the form of a questionnaire or an interview. Surveys are one of the most widely used scientific research methods. The standard survey format allows individuals a level of anonymity in which they can express personal ideas.

Not all surveys are considered sociological research. Many surveys people commonly encounter focus on identifying marketing needs and strategies rather than testing a hypothesis or contributing to social science knowledge. Questions such as, “How many hot dogs do you eat in a month?” or “Were the staff helpful?” are not usually designed as scientific research. Surveys gather different types of information from people. While surveys are not great at capturing the ways people really behave in social situations, they are a great method for discovering how people feel, think, and act—or at least how they say they feel, think, and act. Surveys can track preferences for presidential candidates or reported individual behaviors (such as sleeping, driving, or texting habits) or information such as employment status, income, and education levels.

2.4.3.2 Experiments

One way researchers test social theories is by conducting an experiment, meaning the researcher investigates relationships to test a hypothesis. This approach closely resembles the scientific method. There are two main types of experiments: lab-based experiments and natural or field experiments. In a lab setting, the research can be controlled so that data can be recorded in a limited amount of time. In a natural or field-based experiment, the time it takes to gather the data cannot be controlled but the information might be considered more accurate since it was collected without interference or intervention by the researcher. Field-based experiments are often used to evaluate interventions in educational settings and health (Baldassarri and Abascal 2017).

Typically, the sociologist selects a set of people with similar characteristics, such as age, class, race, or education. Those people are divided into two groups. One is the experimental group and the other is the control group. The experimental group is exposed to the independent variable(s) and the control group is not. To test the benefits of tutoring, for example, the sociologist might provide tutoring to the experimental group of students but not to the control group. Then both groups would be tested for differences in performance to see if tutoring had an effect on the experimental group of students. As you can imagine, in a case like this, the researcher would not want to jeopardize the accomplishments of either group of students, so the setting would be somewhat artificial. The test would not be for a grade reflected on their permanent record as a student, for example.

2.4.3.3 Secondary Data Analysis

While sociologists often engage in original research studies, they also contribute knowledge to the discipline through secondary data analysis. Secondary data does not result from firsthand research collected from primary sources. Instead secondary data uses data collected by other researchers or data collected by an agency or organization. Sociologists might study works written by historians, economists, teachers, or early sociologists. They might search through periodicals, newspapers, or magazines, or organizational data from any period in history.

2.4.3.4 Participant Observation

Participant observation refers to a style of research where researchers join people and participate in a group’s routine activities for the purpose of observing them within that context. This method lets researchers experience a specific aspect of social life. A researcher might go to great lengths to get a firsthand look into a trend, institution, or behavior. For instance, a researcher might work as a waitress in a diner, experience homelessness for several weeks, or ride along with police officers as they patrol their regular beat. Often, these researchers try to blend in seamlessly with the population they study, and they may not disclose their true identity or purpose if they feel it would compromise the results of their research.

At the beginning of a field study, researchers might have a question: “What really goes on in the kitchen of the most popular diner on campus?” or “What is it like to be homeless?” Participant observation is a useful method if the researcher wants to explore a certain environment from the inside. The ethnographer will be alert and open minded to whatever happens, recording all observations accurately. Soon, as patterns emerge, questions will become more specific, and the researcher will be able either make connections to existing theories or develop new theories based on their observations. This approach will guide the researcher in analyzing data and generating results.

2.4.3.5 In-depth interviews

Interviews, sometimes referred to as in-depth interviews, are one-on-one conversations with participants designed to gather information about a particular topic. Interviews can take a long time to complete, but they can produce very rich data. In fact, in an interview, a respondent might say something that the researcher had not previously considered, which can help focus the research project. Researchers have to be careful not to use leading questions. You want to avoid leading the respondent into certain kinds of answers by asking questions like, “You really like eating vegetables, don’t you?” Instead researchers should allow the respondent to answer freely by asking questions like, “How do you feel about eating vegetables?”

2.4.4 International Research

International research is conducted outside of the researcher’s own immediate geography and society. This work carries additional challenges considering that researchers often work in regions and cultures different from their own. Researchers need to make special considerations in order to counter their own biases, navigate linguistic challenges and ensure the best cross cultural understanding possible. This webpage shows a map and descriptions of field projects around the world by students at Oxford University’s Masters in Development Studies. What are some interesting projects that stand out to you?

For example, in 2021 Jörg Friedrichs at Oxford published his research on Muslim hate crimes in areas of North England where Islam is the majority religion. He studied police data of racial and religious hate crimes in two districts to look for patterns related to the crimes. He related those patterns to the wider context of community relations between Muslims and other groups, and presented his research to hate crime practitioners in police, local government and civil society (Friedrichs 2021).

2.4.5 Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous scientists also critique traditional ways of doing science. Often, Western science will break things down into parts to understand what each part does. While that may help understand details, it doesn’t give the whole picture of a process or help understand the interdependence in the social and physical world. Also, Western science values intellectual ways of knowing. Intuition, empathy, and connection are not valued. Robin Wall Kimmer, an Indigenous biologist from the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes this:

Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body. As a young person wanting to know everything about plants, I did not question this. But it is a whole human being who finds the beautiful path. (Kimmerer 2013)

When we can do science using all of our ways of knowing, our answers become richer. As the world becomes more aware of increases in the environmental crisis, researchers are more often acknowledging the ways that Indigenous peoples care for their ecological surroundings. As Indigenous communities conduct their own fieldwork to identify and document their own knowledge they are able to engage with research as agents of ecological conservation.

Figure 2.30 Consider This with Robin Wall Kimmerer [YouTube Video]

In the video in Figure 2.30, Kimmerer has a longer conversation about what it means to be American. Starting around minute 55:25 she shares the importance of naming, and how naming can sometimes shut down learning. Please listen to her words for yourself, and reflect on how the practices she introduces might change your own approach to science.

2.4.6 Community-Based Research and Participatory Action Research

Social problems sociologists and other social scientists often conduct their research so that they can take action. Action research is a family of research methodologies that pursue action (or change) and research (or understanding) at the same time. We see this when the government changes a policy based on data or when a community organization tries a new evidence-based approach for providing services. One of the most visible applications of social problems research is through humanitarian or social action efforts.

2.4.6.1 Humanitarian Efforts

One effective example of social action efforts is in the work of Paul Farmer. Farmer was a public health physician, anthropologist, and founder of partners in health. Until his death in 2022, he focused on epidemiological crises in low and middle income countries.

One trend that Farmer championed was the importance of good health and health care as human rights. He contributed to a broader understanding that poor health is a symptom of poverty, violence and inequality (Partners in Health 2009). If you want to learn more, please watch the NPR video essay, “ Paul Farmer: I believe in health care as a human right ” [YouTube Video] where he describes this view. What field experiences of Farmer’s do you see allowed him to develop this view?

Farmer applied this human rights perspective to pandemics. His book, Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds: Ebola and the Ravages of History , looks at the 2014 Ebola crisis, and what we can learn from it to apply to the COVID-19 epidemic. In a PBS Newshour interview he spoke of his work during the Ebola outbreak:

>Early in the Ebola outbreak, almost all of our attention was turned towards clinical services. But we kept on bumping into things we didn’t understand and sometimes even our colleagues from Sierra Leone and Liberia didn’t understand. And that just triggered an interest in a deeper understanding of the place, the culture, the history. (Public Broadcasting Service 2021).

Farmer shares his experiences both as a medical doctor and a researcher, asking the questions: “Who is most impacted by disease? How might things have been done differently? What can be done now?” His research on Ebola focused on circumstances in West Africa where lack of medical resources and decades of war played a role in the epidemic, and how the epidemic itself, as we experience in the United States with Covid, revealed underlying problems and inequities in society (Public Broadcasting Service 2021). We’ll explore topics of health, inequality and interdependence more deeply in Chapter 7 .

2.4.6.2 Community-Based Action Research

Community-based research takes place in community settings. It involves community members in the design and implementation of research projects. It demonstrates respect for the contributions of success that are made by community partners. Research projects involve collaboration between researchers and community partners, whether the community partners are formally structured community-based organizations or informal groups of individual community members. The aim of this type of research is to benefit the community by achieving social justice through social action and change.

2.4.6.3 Participatory Action Research

Community-based research is sometimes called participatory action research (Stringer 2021). In partnership with community organizations, researchers apply their social science research skills to help assess needs, outcomes, and provide data that can be used to improve living conditions. The research is rigorous and often published in professional reports and presented to the board of directors for the organization you are working with. As it sounds, action research suggests that we make a plan to implement changes. Often with academic research, we aim to learn more about a population and leave the next steps up to others. This is an important part of the puzzle, as we need to start with knowledge but action research often has the goal of fixing something or at least quickly translating the newly acquired findings into a solution for a social problem.

To learn more about participatory action research, check out this short 4 minute clip for an introduction with Shirah Hassan of Just Practice (figure 2.31):

Figure 2.31 Participatory Action Research with Shirah Hassan  [YouTube Video]

Community-based action research looks for evidence. As new insights emerge, the researchers adjust the question or the approach. This type of research engages people who have traditionally been referred to as subjects as active participants in the research process. The researcher is working with the organization during the whole process and will likely bring in different project design elements based on the needs of the organization. Social scientists can bring more formalized training, but they draw both on existing research/literature and goals of the organization they are working with. Community-based research or participatory research can be thought of as an orientation for research rather than strictly a method. Often a number of different methods are used to collect data. Change can often be one of the main aims of the project, as we will see in the box below.

2.4.7 Research Ethics

How we do science and how we apply our results is more challenging than it might first appear. The American Sociological Association (ASA) is the major professional organization of sociologists in North America. ASA is a great resource for students of sociology as well. The ASA maintains a code of ethics —formal guidelines for conducting sociological research—consisting of principles and ethical standards to be used in the discipline. These formal guidelines were established by practitioners in 1905 at John Hopkins University, and revised in 1997. When working with human subjects, these codes of ethics require researchers’ to do the following:

  • Maintain objectivity and integrity in research
  • Respect subjects’ rights to privacy and dignity
  • Protect subject from personal harm
  • Preserve confidentiality
  • Seek informed consent
  • Acknowledge collaboration and assistance
  • Disclose sources of financial support

2.4.8 Unethical Studies

Unfortunately, when these codes of ethics are ignored, it creates an unethical environment for humans being involved in a sociological study. Throughout history, there have been numerous unethical studies, as we’ll explore in the following sections.

2.4.8.1 The Tuskegee Experiment

This study was conducted 1932 in Macon County, Alabama, and included 600 African American men, including 399 diagnosed with syphilis. The participants were told they were diagnosed with a disease of “bad blood.” Penicillin was distributed in the 1940s as the cure for the disease, but unfortunately, the African American men were not given the treatment because the objective of the study was to see “how untreated syphilis would affect the African American male” (Caplan 2007). This study was shut down in 1972, because a reporter wrote that at least 128 people had died from syphillis or related complications (Nix 2020).

2.4.8.2 Milgram Experiment

In 1961, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment at Yale University. Its purpose was to measure the willingness of study subjects to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. People in the role of teacher believed they were administering electric shocks to students who gave incorrect answers to word-pair questions. No matter how concerned they were about administering the progressively more intense shocks, the teachers were told to keep going. The ethical concerns involve the extreme emotional distress faced by the teachers, who believed they were hurting other people. (Vogel 2014). Today this experiment would not be allowed because it would violate the ethical principal of protecting subjects from personal harm.

2.4.8.3 Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford prison experiment

In 1971, psychologist Phillip Zimbardo conducted a study involving students from Stanford University. The students were put in the roles of prisoners and guards, and were required to play their assigned role accordingly. The experiment was intended to last two weeks, but it only lasted six days due to the negative outcome and treatment of the “prisoners.” Beyond the ethical concerns, the study’s validity has been questioned after participants revealed they had been coached to behave in specific ways. Today, this experiment would not be allowed because it would violate a participants right to dignity, and protection from harm.

2.4.8.4 Laud Humphreys

In the 1960s, Laud Humphreys conducted an experiment at a restroom in a park known for same-sex sexual encounters. His objective was to understand the diversity of backgrounds and motivations of people seeking same-sex relationships. His ethics were questioned because he misrepresented his identity and intent while observing and questioning the men he interviewed (Nardi 1995). Today this experiment would not be allowed because participants did not provide informed consent, among other issues.

2.4.9 Licenses and Attributions for Research Methods for Social Problems

2.4 Research methods for social problems.

Puentes and Gougherty https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BOCrIQ5xDJD1RbVdmS1glMeaKurj4fHgF5hkn2P77-U/edit#heading=h.lc1f68rgruem Slightly summarized

Figure 2.23 – Ways of Knowing and Examples by Kimberly Puttman. License: CC-BY-ND

Figure 2.24 The Scientific Method as an Ongoing Process by Michaela Willi Hooper and Jennifer Puentes. License: CC-BY-4.0.

Figure 2.25 Examples of dependent and independent variables. Typically, the independent variable causes the dependent variable to change in some way. [c] [d]

Figure 2.26 Drawing of Ibn al-Hayatham by Unknown Artist, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons public domain.

Figure 2.27 “ How Trees Talk To Each Other ” by Suzanne Simard. License Terms: Standard YouTube license.

2.4.2 Interpretive Frameworks by Kimberly Puttman. License: CC-BY-4.0

Figure 2.28 “ Hidden Figures Premiere ” by NASA/Aubrey Gemignani, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons public domain.

Figure 2.29. Interpretive Framework Source – Kim Puttman [e]

Figure 2.30 “ Consider This with Robin Wall Kimmerer ” by Oregon Humanities . License Terms: Standard YouTube license.

Figure 2.31 “ Participatory Action Research ” with Shirah Haasan by Vera Instit ute of Justice . License Terms: Standard YouTube license.

Social Problems Copyright © by Kim Puttman. All Rights Reserved.

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Psychology and Solutions to Social Problems

In his review of  Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era,  Jeffrey Rubin  discusses the book authors' beliefs that psychology has a role to play in identifying and developing solutions to the complex psychological, social, and economic causes of our global crises. Rubin notes,

usefully reminds readers that psychology needs to expand to include the world that shapes and affects all of us, including discriminatory social realities, structural barriers to services and justice, and systematic socioeconomic disparities and inequities.

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The authors attempt to describe changes in theory, research, training, and practice that are required to contribute to a “globally conscious, socially responsible psychology”(p. 77). However, Rubin suggests that, although the book makes the case for a socially responsible psychology and the role it plays and can play in identification of the causes of global ills, the solutions and recommendations for change offered lack nuance and complexity. Rubin focuses on the neglect of emotions and unconscious processes that may contribute to a number of the negative influences in society—greed, overconsumption, and the refusal to engage in practices that ensure a more sustainable world. He suggests drawing on psychoanalytic understandings to overcome some of the limitations of the authors' recommendations.

Although analytic understandings can be usefully integrated, is this enough to reach the stated goal of the book? What role does scholarship in content areas such as social, organizational, educational, and school psychology play in finding solutions to social inequity? Does the development of a socially responsible psychology require a disciplinary shift in methodology and focus in order to solve problems of crime and violence?

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Psychology in the Global Age By Jeffrey Rubin PsycCRITIQUES, 2014 Vol 59(8)

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Three ways for social science to help the environment

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

I came to the 2009 Amsterdam Conference on Earth System Governance with a specific question in mind: what role can social science play in helping to solve environmental problems? This topic came up in nearly every presentation I listened to and every conversation I had. To me, this in itself is significant. If social science is to play a role, it should be conscious of this role and actively shaping it. That being said, there are no clear answers. My conclusion is that there are three ways social science can help, and it is up to researchers to decide which path (if any) they would like to take.

This item was part of the blog series ‘Navigating the Anthropocene’

The Earth system is changing rapidly due to human activity. The scale of human interference with planetary systems is such that our time could be recognized as a new era in planetary history: the ‘anthropocene’. The adverse impacts of human activities could, inadvertently, even change the Earth system irreversibly to a mode inhospitable to humans and other life. Navigating the anthropocene is thus a key challenge for policy makers and a challenge for (social) sciences because the institutions, organizations and governance systems by which humans currently govern their relationship with the environment are not only insufficient, but also poorly understood.

The first path is the traditional path. On this path, scientists work busily at their desks, are fairly removed from the everyday concerns of policy makers, and pursue research questions that fascinate and motivate them. I believe this kind of science path does contribute to the general knowledge bank we have at our disposal and can be of use to people looking for answers to policy questions. Especially in today’s world of research-savvy NGOs and evidence-based policy, it seems possible that the ‘trickle down’ effect of good science is alive. There were many examples of this type of science at the meeting this week: solid empirical works that could be used by people if they were to need it.

However, this path may not be a very direct one. A second path that I discovered this week is the action path. On this path, social scientists work actively with communities to achieve change through the research process itself. What does this mean? It means social scientists might organize meetings where stakeholders can engage in debate, demonstrate sustainability projects, or educate communities about their rights. This research path actively engages with communities to achieve the change people would like to see, and at the same time reflects on that change and uses the experience to improve social science. Some researchers this week told stories about their experience with this type of research, and the results were usually impressive.

This type of action research is not attractive to all social scientists. The third path social scientists can take to help solve environmental problems is the framing path. There are many ways to frame a given environmental problem, and researchers have control over how they make this decision. At this morning’s semi-plenary session on ‘New Theories in Earth System Governance’, each speaker spoke convincingly about the role framing plays in the policy process, and how people like Al Gore help change this framing. For example, it may not always be useful to frame environmental problems as climate change problems. Instead, perhaps our research should focus on production patterns, transportation systems, or property rights. This may help the research results to gain political traction and therefore produce faster improvements in larger issues like climate change. Our community and our funders don’t always make this easy for us. Even if climate change lacks political traction for our respective policy makers, it might have major traction for conference organizers, journal editors and funding agencies. The success of this path depends not only on our choices as individuals but our culture as a research community. Funny, it seems the change starts with us!

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Engaging Citizens in Society

In South Korea, a core principle of social innovation is finding ways to engage citizens at the grassroots level.

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By EunKyung (E. K.) Lee Feb. 16, 2017

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

South Korea, home of global conglomerates such as Samsung and Hyundai Motor, is often portrayed as an icon of economic development and democratic progress. In just half a century, its percapita income jumped from a meager $100 to more than $27,000. Seoul, the country’s capital, is a metropolis of 10 million people where modern skyscrapers and subways abut traditional Buddhist temples and street markets.

Social Innovation and Social Transition in East Asia

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

This special supplement examines the different ways that social innovation is evolving in China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan, as a result of each country’s unique history, culture, and political-economic system.

East Asia’s Role in Global Social Innovation

Understanding china’s third sector, making strides in social innovation, using the internet to transform giving | 2, fashioning new values in hong kong, partnering for impact, engaging citizens in society | 1, innovating local government, creating systemic change, solving japan’s childcare problem | 1.

South Korea is also one of just a few countries to succeed in changing its political landscape from authoritarian to democratic through civil movements, and—equally or perhaps more importantly—to have maintained political stability for decades following that transformation.

The country’s notable gains, however, have come with some significant downsides. Consider these social challenges:

  • The level of social inequality in South Korea is comparable to that in many advanced nations.
  • Fast-track economic development has brought with it serious environmental degradation.
  • Driven by an excessively competitive culture, South Korea has the highest suicide rates among OECD countries, along with a dangerously low birth rate.
  • Young people face an unfriendly job market; unemployment is rampant. In many ways, South Korean youth want to live differently than their parents did, but the barriers to do so are great. What’s more, intergenerational conflict is worsening.
  • The social welfare system in South Korea is weak. That reality, coupled with the destruction of community and social bonds, has been cause for despair among underprivileged citizens.

Clearly, South Korea has great needs. But there’s also great potential in the ability of social innovation to meet the country’s formidable challenges. Social innovation, done right, can help solve social problems and promote sustainable growth by engaging citizens, promoting and supporting more comprehensive and inclusive policies, and directing business interests toward the gaps in the society’s fabric.

A Granular Look at the Challenges

South Korea is not alone in many of the problems it faces. Rapid state-driven economic development has given rise to a wide gap in wealth distribution, poor labor and human rights practices, and uneven distribution of resources and services between cities and rural areas in other Asian countries as well.

While South Korea shares many problems with its Asian neighbors, some of its challenges are unique. Its economic development has been led in large part by business conglomerates (chaebols) that have strong government support.

Not only is there little evidence of any trickle-down benefits from the chaebols’ economic success to small and medium-size businesses; there are indications that the chaebols are actually becoming a significant obstacle to their growth. There are also ongoing concerns about the corrupt relationships between the chaebols and the government, and the chaebols’ weak attention to their social responsibilities.

Another social challenge that South Korea faces is education. Its highly competitive educational system puts enormous pressure on students to enter college. Suicide is the leading cause of death among teens. 1 Stress continues as teens become young adults because getting a decent job after graduating from college has become harder due to slow economic growth and a tight job market.

South Korea is also getting older, due to declining birthrates and increasing lifespans. People aged 65 or older made up 13.1 percent of the population in 2015; that level is expected to reach 40.1 percent in 2060. These trends create new challenges, not only to increase welfare spending and create job markets for the elderly, but also to reactivate retiring baby boomers as active contributors to the society.

Another challenge facing South Korea is that many people distrust a political system that no longer seems to represent its citizens. Party politics in South Korea have failed to embrace the voices of existing social groups or support the transformation of civil society.

In addition, a handful of political elites who have been controlling the political arena in South Korea still foster Cold War ideologies and continue to operate a party system based on the regional antagonism between the Yongnam (southeastern South Korea) and Honam (southwestern South Korea) provinces. Distrust and cynicism, in turn, have led to a steady decline in voting rates. 2

Promising Signs of Social Innovation

All of these factors contribute to a challenging environment for social innovators. But the good news is that social innovation has a toehold in South Korea, and the movement is growing. At its core, social innovation in South Korea is based on a commitment to full-fledged citizen participation. Through such participation, increasing numbers of people become strong economic players and increase their involvement in the country’s decision-making processes regarding policy. Many people firmly believe that through these types of changes, South Korea’s current (and destructive) path of fast-track economic development can be redirected toward a path of sustainable economic growth.

Citizen participation in local issues existed long before the concept of social innovation was introduced. The difference now is that this participation is taking new forms; it is more independently organized, and focused on explicit and sustained results. The agricultural movement, for example, has evolved into regional self-help cooperative movements. These cooperatives have grown into grassroots citizen networks and are now playing a key role in the regional community. Examples can be found in Wonju and Hongsung. Wonju, a medium-size city, has tried to build a self-reliant economy centering around the local social economic network based on various cooperatives. Hongsung is a rural area that has set up an independent economy by being the first to introduce an environmentally friendly agricultural system.

And some citizens’ local engagement efforts in urban areas are now focused on reviving communities. Grassroots projects aimed at revitalizing communities in Seoul, Suwon, Ansan, and Incheon have linked up with innovative government policies at the municipal, township, and district levels, promoting citizen participation, citizen governance, and balanced regional development.

Community village movements that organically emerged in the 1990s to promote environmental sustainability, social welfare, and well-being among progressive city residents have evolved into the village community project of Seoul City and other cities. Many of these residents-led village communities have become a base to promote urban revitalization as well as residents’ participation in local administrative and policymaking.

Young People Lead the Way

Clearly, the potential of the rising generation to effect change is a bright spot on South Korea’s horizon. Broadly speaking, these young people have little respect for authority, do not like to form organizations, and are very individualistic. However, they also can easily carry out various online-based activities, having grown up in one of the world’s leading information technology powerhouses, and can proactively lead and disseminate public opinion in online communities.

As a result, young people are stirring up a fresh new wind among the traditional South Korean civil society organizations, which have typically been led by a strong elite individual, backed by a well-organized structure, political parties, and the media. The younger generation, by contrast, works with new media, utilizes new platforms for dialogue and knowledge sharing in rapidly expanding online communities, and makes full use of technology tools. Most important, young people are extremely flexible in terms of putting together activities across sectors, organizations, and businesses to achieve their goals.

Young social innovators in the private sector—including community businesses, self-help companies, and cooperatives—are armed with a challenging spirit and the desire to achieve their aspirations as social innovation entrepreneurs. Their goal is to build a strong basis for social innovation throughout the social economic ecosystem.

Local Government Support

Local governments, in particular, deserve recognition for their efforts to create and implement diverse social innovation policies. These policies are based on the idea that social innovation is an effective means by which to maintain transparent administration, motivate community independence, and encourage local citizens to participate in the decisions and activities that will shape their futures.

Several local governments either have officially declared social innovation as the basis of their policies or have let their actions convey their intentions by quietly implementing policies that encourage local people’s participation and communication. One example is the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which pronounced social innovation as its policy base and has been implementing tangible social innovation policies, such as Sharing City , Seoul Youth Hub , and the Seoul Senior Support Center . (See “ Innovating Local Government ” on page 18.)

Other local governments, including Wanju-Gun, are also promoting socially innovative concepts and strategies. For example, they are setting up offices to oversee social innovation programs and work on legislation. They are securing funds, from either government budgets or social financing, to support social innovation, and are establishing intermediary organizations and networks to facilitate collaboration between governments and companies. Some local governments are also supporting their local social innovators by adopting social innovation projects to foster local self-reliance, leading to the revitalization of local economies and communities.

Building a Better Future

In a matter of decades, South Korea has gone through rapid changes and development, from a premodern to a modern society, from a dictatorship to a democracy, and from an aid-recipient country to a donor country. These changes were largely positive, but they came with significant unwanted and negative side effects. That fallout—coupled with a slowing economy, an aging population, and a falling birthrate—has put South Korean society at a crossroads. A promising future is not a given; it is up to the country’s leaders and citizens to find and follow the right course. Creating a better future depends on welldesigned social change efforts, anchored by social innovation.

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Thursday, August 9, 2018

Social Business as a Solution to World Problems

how traditional path can help to solve social problems

This past June, I attended the Social Business Day conference in Bangalore, India through the encouragement of Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. This conference gathered social entrepreneurs from all around the world to discuss how social business could solve world problems.

I have long been interested in social business as an alternative model to traditional profit-driven business. After hearing Dr. Yunus’ speech at the award ceremony for the Ford Family Notre Dame Award for International Development and Solidarity , I began to see this model as an ideal one that combined the efficiency of business and the humanitarian pursuit of philanthropy. As I was hoping to delve more into startups in the fashion industry, I intended to 1) understand how social business works and if it really is a good model of business to adopt, 2) explore how social business could help solve world problems, and 3) make meaningful connections with social entrepreneurs in different industries and sectors.

I was able to find some initial answers from this conference. First, social business as defined by Dr. Muhammad Yunus is “a non-dividend company that is created to address and solve a social problem. In a social business, the investors/owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point.” While I appreciated the generosity and idealism of entrepreneurs who adopted this kind of social business model, I also saw limitations to it. For one thing, having a cap on dividends potentially deter the growth of the ventures because businessmen might end up ignoring the profit side or losing the momentum to maintain and grow the business. This model could thus make ventures less sustainable and self-sufficient. One of the young entrepreneurs shared with me that he wished he had been more profit-focused -- even though his venture addressed the needs of teenagers who hoped to find a non-traditional career path and was able to grow over the past years, he himself had experienced financial difficulties.

Through conversations like this, I realized that social business didn’t have to go as far as defined by Dr. Muhammad Yunus. Business with social consciousness could still address social problems while making sure the business itself is well-functioned and at least self-sufficient.

Second, social business has the potential to and could really solve world problems. Over the two days’ conference, I heard people from all different industries sharing how their business contributed to social good. These stories really inspired me and convinced me that business and social good are not contradictory, and that most businesses could find ways to address and solve social problems. I have heard about how a specialty coffee company dedicated itself to biodiversity conservation and higher financial returns to farmers through innovating the farming practices and controlling the market chain; how a technology company designed and sold bangles that detect the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air for pregnant women; how some local organizations provided microloans to support small-businesses and help alleviate unemployment. Even though the size of these businesses’ impacts differ, they are all solving world problems in their own ways.

And of course -- I was able to get to know some inspiring social entrepreneurs and learn about their insights into the development and status-quo of social business in their respective countries. Among numerous people I met, the president of Grameen China shared with me how Chinese governmental policies to alleviate poverty had provided booming opportunities for microfinance and social business within mainland China.

This conference was definitely a highly educational experience that allowed me to learn and redefine social business in a way that I found is both sustainable and capable of solving social problems. The stories I heard and the people I met will for sure continue to inspire me to remain social-minded and promote the various forms of social business.

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  2. How Can We Solve Our Social Problems? by James A. Crone

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  4. How Can We Solve Our Social Problems? / Edition 2 by James A. Crone

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COMMENTS

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  7. How Can We Solve Our Social Problems?

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