Can social enterprise stand for persons with disabilities? The case of South Korean social enterprises, 2007–2008

Abstract

This article explores whether social enterprise can be an alternative for work integration of the disabled. Although persons with disabilities have undergone more severe exclusion than have other socially disadvantaged groups in the labour market, social enterprises selected the disabled as one of their main target groups, helping enact disability-centered public policy. However, unlike the high expectation social enterprise gained during its formation, less attention has been paid to the actual content and goal of social enterprise. This analysis of 154 Korean social enterprises shows that the disabled are the most represented among socially disadvantaged groups in social enterprises. At the same time, disability-centered social enterprises focus considerably on creating jobs for the disabled rather than on providing social services for them. The findings are discussed in relation to some policy implications and issues facing social enterprises.

Keywords:

• social enterprise
• disability employment
• job creation
• work integration

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by Brain Korea 21 grant to sociology department at Yonsei University, South Korea. Also, a preliminary version of this study was presented at the 5th East Asian Social Policy conference, Taipei, Taiwan, 2008, and Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) international conference, Singapore, 2009. I am grateful to Chan-ung Park, Byeong-eun Cheong, Jeong-han Kang and the Journal of Asian Public Policy reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

1. Gender inequality is serious among the disabled. Based on 2000 census and disability survey, the labour force participation rate of disabled female is 19.5%. This is only 40.4% level of not-disabled female and 39.4% of disabled male. Disabled females are suffering severely from both disadvantages of being disabled and being a female (Sung et al. 2003).

2. Despite the frequent usage of such comparison, there are several drawbacks in the dichotomous typology between American and European models. Above all, it is difficult to catch the variations within Europe, because most European countries are not familiar with the concept of non-profit organization or non-profit sector (DiMaggio and Anheier 1990). For example, in the United Kingdom, the government certifies proper social enterprises unlike majority of other Western societies. Also in Portugal and Italy, it is legally forbidden to redistribute the revenue of social enterprise to its recipients at all. In addition, there is a tendency to exclude American model from social enterprises in general because it does not assume recipient involvement (Defourny 2001). However, such exclusion may ignore the most important similarity between two models, that they lie at the intersection of the state, market and the civil society (Bidet 2006). Social enterprises in the United States have their social purpose that makes them avoid opportunistic behaviour (Weisbrod 1988). Therefore, I argue that it is worth of note to regard them as another type of social enterprise.

3. The competitive ratio was about one-third, and it is important to notice that there were no quotas on target groups the social enterprises aim at. Two-third of applicants were mostly organizations that failed to clarify ‘sufficient lawful prerequisites’, ‘realized operating revenue’ or ‘established memorandum’ (Cho 2007), thereby unable to pass the certification process.

4. However, if the result is overestimating the actual number of employees, perhaps it may have stemmed from the size of foundations. Several foundations did not distinguish paid workers from clients who abide in the center or facility. Some places designate them commonly as ‘folks’.

5. It is possible that when target group is not clarified, new jobs are likely to be only for people with higher productivity and capacity to work. Especially in Korea, there has been a strong tendency of married – but not disabled – women occupying the social service field as a secondary earner, because wages of social enterprises are usually not enough to meet the cost of living of a family in most cases (Kim 2007).

6. In the logit regression model, I did not include organizational size (number of employees) because the response rate was only 44.15%. Size is usually an important variable in most organizational studies. However, ‘size’ of Korean social enterprises did not have any significant correlation with any other variables in the model, except for dummy variable for foundations. Also, the logistic coefficient for size alone was nearly zero (−0.003), so I assumed that omitted variable bias would be quite small.