(Bounded) Exit, voice, and politics: pandemic education in US and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article theorizes how crises and markets shape the responses of consumers and producer organizations. We advance four propositions: 1) if a crisis requires major revisions in operational rules, less-exit sensitive (i.e., monopoly-like) organizations shall revise to aggregate preferences of organized producers; and more-exit sensitive (market-oriented) organizations, to the preferences of individual consumers; 2) if a sustained crisis widens the gap between incumbent organizations and consumer preferences, more consumers shall exit to alternative organizations; 3) if the incumbent organization controls valued resources, consumers shall select more-bounded exit options, which retain formal-legal ties with the incumbent; and 4) compared to less-bounded exit, more-bounded exit options shall enhance consumers’ collective voice about incumbent organizations. We inductively derive our theory from an exploratory analysis of educational organizations in US and South Korea during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Many consumers were dissatisfied with regular-public schools and considered various exit alternatives, including non-regular schools (e.g., private, charter [US], homeschooling [US], special-purpose [Korea]) and private supplemental education. Compared to less-bounded exit (e.g., private schools), more-bounded exit options (e.g., charter, PSE) grew more, and contributed more to consumer voice about regular-public schools, during the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis
• exit
• voice
• Covid
• education politics
• Korea

Acknowledgement

We appreciate the assistance of MCC Academy staff and students. This article was supported by Hanyang University Research Fund.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2022.2118669.

Notes

1. In this article, the terms regular, regular-public, public, and district-public schools are generally interchangeable.

2. In Korea, what we term regular-public schools (K-12) technically include some privately founded schools, whose budget and curriculum come from the government and which are not distinguishable from public schools.

3. Categories of special-purpose schools include global/international, foreign language, science, arts, sports, and industry (Ministry of Education, Secondary Education, http://english.moe.go.kr/sub/info.do?m=020103&s=english).

4. Naver is most popular South Korean web search engine, with 59% share of Korean users and with 200 million users around the world (Internet Trend, 2021).

5. Interview with private middle-school teacher (female, 38), 16 July 2020.

6. Communication from Christ University* alumnus (male, 33), 28 Sept 2020.

7. Communication from BCC director Sam (male, 45), 14 August 2020.

8. Communication from PSE teacher (male, 33), 17 Oct 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the Hanyang University Research Fund.

Notes on contributors

Joseph Yi

Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul). He received his PhD in political science from University of Chicago. Yi studies the development of individual liberty in various settings, from mature democracies (e.g., USA) to young democracies (South Korea) to closed autocracies (North Korea); and communication and cooperation across social groups and countries, especially in East Asia and North America. Yi has authored many journal essays and research article (available at https://hanyang.academia.edu/JosephYi).

Junbeom Bahk

Junbeom Bahk is a doctoral student in political science at UCLA (Los Angeles). He received in BA at Vanderbilt and MA at John Hopkins. Bahk is interested in international political economy.

Seungho Jon

Seungho Jon is a junior research fellow at Marco College Community Academy (Seoul).