Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- South Africa (1)
- constitutionalism (1)
- democracy (1)
- rawls (1)
- social justice (1)
Forging a Local Social Economy: On the Institutional Work of Local Governments in South Korea
(2023)
This study investigates the strategies local governments can employ to stimulate the growth of the local social economy sector—a sector associated with improving residents’ subjective well-being. Acknowledging the under-explored but potentially pivotal role of local government as a catalyst, our research uses an institutionalist lens—focusing on institutional work, support, and public-sector entrepreneurship—to examine how local governments can encourage the establishment of social economy organizations. We adopt a Partial Least Squares Model-Structural Equation Modeling approach to analyze data from 69 South Korean urban metropolitan local governments between 2018 and 2020. Our findings reveal a significant positive relationship between the regulatory, administrative, and intermediary support mechanisms implemented by local governments and the scale of the local social economy. By integrating public-sector entrepreneurship with institutional perspectives, our findings enrich existing literature and provide insight into the strategic initiatives local governments can adopt to foster social entrepreneurship.
This dissertation delineates the state-induced emergence and mainstreaming of South Korea’s (hereinafter, ‘Korea’) social enterprise sector following the enactment of a social enterprise promotion act in 2007. In particular, this dissertation contextualizes the public sector-led popularization and mobilization of social enterprises and studies the outcomes of this intervention. This dissertation includes analyses of networks, discourse, and geographic agglomerations, and it highlights the pressures, mechanisms, institutions, and organizations that have been integral to this process of state-induced innovation. It contributes to the literature on interactions between the state and social economy organizations, such as social enterprises. The relationship between the state and social economy organizations has been subject to much academic scrutiny, and the Korean case contributes to this literature by illustrating how the state has induced the emergence and scaling of social enterprises as a private organizational form and also by showing where social enterprises have flourished. The Korean case contrasts with the North American and European cases in that in Korea the state purposively popularized social enterprise, as opposed to the North American and European traditions where the origins of social enterprise are more closely linked to civil society. This has implications for how states can induce the founding of private organizational forms that serve their interests. Korea is an especially intriguing case study given that ‘social enterprise’ as an organizational form was almost entirely absent from Korean society prior to 2007, yet has now become embedded into society in the sense that social enterprises are found in nearly every industry and municipal district. There are now thousands of social enterprises in Korea a little more than a decade after the enactment of social enterprise promotion legislation. Civil society has, evidently, accepted social enterprises as a valid organizational form. This dissertation seeks to establish an empirical platform and a theoretical framework which can be utilized for a more theoretical analysis of social enterprise and other social economy organizations in Korea in future studies. Nevertheless, this dissertation does reveal how actors can manipulate the path dependencies imposed by history, and the capabilities bequeathed by it, to forge new possibilities in novel and strategic ways. The Korean state’s ability to induce social innovation is a tangible illustration of such.
John Rawls featured prominently in the philosophical debate on social justice, bringing issues of individual freedom, civil rights and equal opportunity to the forefront. When considering the conceptualisation of social justice in South Africa, one is struck with the wealth of very ‘Rawlsian’ liberal democratic ideals suffused into the country’s constitution, alongside its dream of constitutional transformation. This is juxtaposed to the ideology and policies of the African National Congress, with its proclivities that are an antithesis to a veritable liberal constitutional democracy. Herein is found a dialectic in which the topic of justice is situated and analysed using the philosophy of Rawls as a benchmark. One is then faced with the confusion surrounding social justice in South Africa, what it means and how it is to be achieved. Concomitantly, the role and place of the individual is brought to the fore, begging the question of what citizens owe each other.