Elaboración de un procedimiento general para el mejoramiento de sistema de control de

5.5.1 Challenges as a Researcher in the Field

Although I have worked in the Korean social entrepreneurship field before I started my Ph.D. and I had carried out prior research on the current state of social enterprises in South Korea before my fieldwork, sometimes I found myself telling my interviewees that I do not know many things about what is currently going on in the field especially. By positioning myself as someone who has been away for some time and therefore needs to be informed by the people I meet, I was able to ask more straightforward questions without appearing to be too blunt. Interviewees were also more inclined to tell me more stories in that way and sometimes they also invited me to attend their formal and informal group meetings. In most cases, they told me that “if you could come to attend our meetings/gatherings, you would learn a lot more about what’s going on in the field.” I went to all the occasions I was invited to, whether it was formal or informal meetings.

Every time I met new people in the field, people always asked me about the current state of social enterprises in the UK. For Korean social entrepreneurs, the UK represents a well-known country with a strong governmental support promoting social entrepreneurship, which has become a role model policy of the SEPA. People asked me questions on whether the actual social entrepreneurship field is as they heard it is through newspapers, lectures, and documentaries. Sometimes they asked me very specific questions focused on a certain sector of social enterprise in the UK: such as health care, social investments, impact bonds or cooperatives. All of my experiences in the UK, working on research papers about the UK government’s policies promoting social entrepreneurship, attending social entrepreneurship conferences and seminars, visiting UK social enterprises, having conversations with social entrepreneurs, and coordinating visits of Korean social entrepreneurs and non- profit professionals to UK social enterprises helped me to answer their questions and to position myself as someone who can provide field-level information to them in return.

5.5.2 Limitations of Data Analysis

Although, other researchers have described how to construct data analysis step-by-step in their previous research, a full understanding on how to embrace the analysis process and the necessary analysis skills was never easy for me. I doubted whether I was analyzing the data correctly all the time, so I had to go back to the literature and the theoretical framework many times. I also tried out different analysis methods. Finally, I realized that the data analysis and coding process hardly work in a systematic fashion, but in a more messy way.

However, after a few attempts of data analysis, I was able to develop my own way of analyzing data. Although I used the NVivo to organize and manage the massive data sources I had collected, Microsoft Excel helped me more to structure the results of the analysis in a systematic way. For this reason, I re-typed the results of the analysis in tables in Excel sheets at the end of analysis with NVivo, and this made it easier for me to compare the contents of the disputes between different actors promoting their own discourses.

However, the interview transcriptions seemed to me to be new and different every time I went back to them, so new themes kept emerging even during the writing up stage. Managing and constructing new themes into existing themes was also a very complicated process.

I wrote the themes of the findings and the contents of analysis of the results in English both on NVivo and Microsoft Excel, even though I had done all the interviews in Korean. Regardless of the concern that using dual languages in one research would increase the confusion of the researcher and the possibility of translation errors, reading, writing, listening, and thinking in both languages vice versa in the analysis process helped me to me think more than twice if I had translated appropriately between English and Korean.

Foreword to the Finding Chapters

The results of my analysis are presented in three Finding Chapters.

Chapter Six describes the initial stage of the institution building process of Social Enterprise in Korea between 2006 and 2010. This Chapter will unpack the conflicting processes of meaning making between social actors who are located in different social positions. Three instances of conflicts between actors in the policy and civil society area, and between the government and civil society illustrate the political struggle for institutionalization of the concept of social enterprise and its institutional setting. This Chapter outlines how the powerful top-down actors create and take the leading role in an institution-building project and how bottom-up actors instantly react to contribute to the project.

Chapter Seven focuses on the emergence of oppositional discourse as a reaction to the emergence of official and dominant discourses of social enterprise. Two instances of emerging oppositional discourses from intra- and extra-institutional entrepreneurs illustrate how two different groups of actors react differently although they promote a similar discourse to each other in order to conceptualize the different meanings and activities of social enterprise.

Chapter Eight introduces the emergent process of alternative discourses to the official discourse of Social Enterprise – social innovation and entrepreneurship discourses. In this Chapter, I will illustrate how alternative actors who fully reject the official definition of Social Enterprise in the SEPA interpret the meaning of social enterprise differently and how they attracted other actors to their own discourses and organizations by being innovative, different, and financially productive.

6

Initial Stages of the Institution-building Process of SE:

Legislation of the SEPA

6.1

Introduction

“From my perspective, a social enterprise can be legitimated only when it is in an institutional setting - the certification system. Who would call an organization a social enterprise, if it is not certified or if it is not in an institutional setting? Throughout Korean history, we have never had the concept of social economy and so we have no experience of it. So, if a powerful institution like the government hadn’t provided a clear concept, along with the definition and the standards of social enterprises, people must have struggled to understand what a social enterprise is. It’s easier to convince people that ‘we are doing social enterprise’ when the concept of social enterprise is defined by the law. That’s why being institutionalized is important to be accepted in the Korean context. (BJ7, CEO, G SE, 16 June 2014, 14:04PM-16:00PM)”

One of the key themes which repeatedly appears in my data sources is that the term “social enterprise” was legitimated when the government established the law promoting Social Enterprise – the “Social Enterprise Promotion Act (SEPA)” in 2006. In this chapter, first I will trace the initial institutional-building process of the SEPA. Overall, the purpose of this Chapter is to outline the dynamics of the actors and their discourses in the field of social entrepreneurship in Korea and how the most powerful actor – the government – reacted to these field-level dynamics by institutionalizing the meaning and the organizational forms of Social Enterprise. I will also briefly introduce the initial institutionalized meaning of Social Enterprise, which represents the official discourse. Second, I will analyze the struggles between different social groups in the area of policy and civil society and vice versa. This shows the existence of confrontations over the concept and over the requirements needed to be certified as a Social Enterprise. I will conclude this Chapter by outlining the dynamics between the actors and their discourses against the emerging institutional logic which attempts to simplify these dynamics. However, the power of

political authorities was still exceptionally powerful, especially at the initial stage in which the standards of Social Enterprises were constructed.