Some social enterprise researchers describe various discourses of social entrepreneurship and agree that the definition of social enterprise has changed over time along with the emergence and fading of new ideas and actions in different contexts (Cho, 2006, Defourny and Nyssens, 2010, Dey and Steyaert, 2010, Dacin et al., 2011, Munoz, 2010, Nicholls, 2010, Teasdale, 2012). Defourny and Nyssens (2007) provide a comprehensive review of how this has emerged from previous organisational forms of non-profit, co-operative and mainstream business. The authors demonstrate how definitions and approaches to social enterprise have been adopted differently in different times and places. Taking this perspective, this paper observes that social entrepreneurship or social enterprise is not a new phenomenon but a relatively recent term that covers various forms of social business organisations which have emerged from different backgrounds (Simmons, 2008).
This perspective can be linked to discourse studies influenced by Foucault (1980); for some discourse theorists, discourses that constitute concept change over time through interactions between social actors (Dijk, 1997, Fairhurst and Putnam, 2004, Hardy and Phillips, 2004, Wodak and Fairclough, 2004). Since individuals or social actors’ interpretations, actions, and social practices are influenced by different social structures (Hardy and Phillips, 1999, Heracleous and Barrett, 2001), meaning is not standardised from place to place or person to person (Locke, 2001). Therefore, this position is associated with a critical view depending on the discursive field. In this view, “individuals influence the nature of political strategy” (Hardy and Phillips, 2004, p. 303) in order to embed their discourses in the dominant discourse because the meanings or knowledge are constituted by prevailing discourses and minor discourses are trying to resist it by promoting their own definitions (Foucault, 1998, Hardy and Phillips, 2004). In this meaning-making process, dominant meanings structured by multiple actors in a variety of positions (Hardy and Phillips, 2004) can be fixed or changed in certain forms in order to maintain power (Clegg, 1989). Therefore, a critical perspective in organisational discourse studies emphasises “how discourse is used to produce, maintain or resist power, control and inequality through ideology and hegemony” (Mumby & Clair, 1997).
The Korean case of social enterprise is useful in order to observe how the concept of social enterprise has been institutionalised through interactions between other social enterprise discourses in a certain context. Korean social enterprise was mainly institutionalised within the governmental legal framework – the Social Enterprise Promotion Act (SEPA), established in 2006 by the Ministry of Employment and Labour. However, this concept of government social enterprise has been influenced by other discourses such as cooperatives and self-sufficiency enterprise. Moreover, alternative discourses such as social venture and social innovative enterprise have been trying to resist the discourse of social enterprise provided by the government due to its limited definition of social enterprise. As a result, the dominant policy discourse of social enterprise has been changed over time by accepting or rejecting other discourses.
To understand how the dominant policy discourse of social enterprise emerged and changed, an inductive and qualitative research method has been adopted (Langley et al., 2009). This research has been completed mainly based on the academic and policy literature of the period between the establishment of the SEPA in 2006 and 2015. However, online data collection and in-depth and semi-structured interviews also have been done in order to explore different social actors’ perspectives and activities toward the concept of social enterprise.
This research will emphasizes: 1) the change of the concept of social enterprise in Korea (Bidet and Eum, 2011) have been affected by previous and emerging discourses of social enterprise with different social groups in different times; 2) the emergence of new social entrepreneurial discourses from a variety of political actors (bottom-up), and the government’s efforts to appropriate them for its own ends by embedding these discourses in the government defined concept of social enterprise (top-down) have been repeated over time; 3) however, not every discourse was embedded within the dominant policy discourse, but, there have always been competing discourses resisting the dominant discourse provided by the government.
Keywords: social enterprise, meaning-making process, discourse, history, South Korea
