Rise of the Social?: Emerging Social Economy and Changing Care Regime in South Korea

This paper sheds lights on the recent increase in social enterprises and cooperatives, in particular, in care service sector in the context of socializing care from the family. There are two important policy contexts,... [ view full abstract ]

This paper sheds lights on the recent increase in social enterprises and cooperatives, in particular, in care service sector in the context of socializing care from the family. There are two important policy contexts, socialization of care and promotion of social economy. On one hand, there has been looming concerns on care deficit with aging population in South Korea from the 2000s. Korean government implemented a series of socializing care policies including the long term care for elderly in 2008. On the other hand, government implemented the Basic Law on Cooperatives in 2012 and Social Enterprise Promotion Act in 2011, which is known as a response to the negative impact of neo-liberalism. Cooperatives which provides care is at the intersection of these two trends, which emphasizes the social. This paper critically evaluates the emergence of cooperatives and social enterprises, which bears two processes, with gender perspective by raising following questions: What are the contexts of these policy intervention? What kind of tensions arose in this process? To what extent, these processes contribute to change or reinforce the current gender hierarchies in the care labor market? In order to answer these questions, I conducted the case studies of the organizations which provide care which belongs to the social medical cooperatives in South Korea. This study further discusses the tensions between the current gendered labor market and the potentials and limitations of the cooperatives which can bring gender justice within the conception of "the social".

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