Proveedores

A discursive approach emphasizes the fact that different social actors put forward claims against dominant discourses on the basis of their own positions and interests (Maguire and Hardy 2006). According to this approach, struggles between different actors understandably take place in the institutional field, in order to sustain their social positions or to negotiate the meaning of an organization (Maguire and Hardy 2006). In the Korean social entrepreneurship field, the struggles over the meaning of social enterprise developed as outcomes of the institutional pressure of the SEPA that attempted to integrate diverse actors and their discourses into a single standard.

One of the key recurring themes in my data sources, and mainly in the interviews, is given by the confusion over the official meaning of Social Enterprise. As a matter of fact, during the interviews, in order to prevent any confusion between the different discourses of social enterprise of each actor, I found myself having to describe the institutionalized meaning of Social Enterprise as “the Social Enterprise as defined by the SEPA.” Meanwhile, I described the other forms of social enterprise which had not been included in the official definition as “uncertified social enterprises”, “social enterprises in broad terms”, “organizations which are supposed to be social enterprises”, or “bottom-up social enterprises.”

This confusion over the meaning of social enterprise is rooted in the disagreement on the official definition of Social Enterprise. In Chapter Four of this thesis, local development, cooperative and social economy discourses are identified as oppositional discourses. The main actors promoting these oppositional discourses

are represented by bottom-up actors, including intermediary organizations and Civil Society Solidarity for Social Enterprise Development (CSSSED).

Intermediary organizations, instead, such as the Working Together Foundation (WT Foundation) basically share the same viewpoint of top-down actors on the institutionalization of Social Enterprises, as I found in Chapter Six. More specifically, they consider their activities and discourses to be legitimated when they are integrated into the certification system, as BJ7, director of a social enterprise network in local communities, actually mentioned:

“A social enterprise can be perceived as social enterprise because the meaning and criteria have been institutionalized by the law. Otherwise, if you call your organization “social enterprise” without this being institutionalized, it cannot be recognized as a social enterprise by society, especially in the Korean context. (BJ7, CEO, G SE, 16 June 2014, 14:04PM-16:00PM)”

In addition, intermediary organizations who implement the SEPA also share the institutional meaning of Social Enterprise, containing work-related, welfare- related and corporate social responsibility (CSR) discourses, which are mainly promoted by top-down actors. However, oppositional actors also promoted local development discourses from the beginning of the institutional-building project of the SEPA. Their arguments on the contents of the SEPA and the strategies used for the local development discourse to be included in the SEPA will be analyzed in Section 7.4.

The CSSSED, instead, promotes local development, cooperative and also social economy discourses against the official discourse. More specifically, the discourse on local development highlights the core objectives and the role of social enterprises, which aim to develop an economically and socially sustainable local community. The cooperative discourse of social enterprises emphasizes, instead, the need to implement the principles of cooperative governance into the official meaning of social enterprise. Finally, moving to the social economy discourse of social enterprises, this discourse focuses on social entrepreneurship activities as a part of the social economy and not of the market economy. The CSSSED also basically agreed on the need for an institutionalization of social enterprises and on the basic

concept of social enterprise, as described in the SEPA. Nevertheless, the CSSSED pointed out that the institutionalized meaning of social enterprise according to the law is too limited and therefore does not include the value and philosophy of social enterprise, as explained by DW2:

“Social enterprise has become a proper noun because of the SEPA. Now people perceive a social enterprise only as the certified social enterprises supported by the Ministry of Employment and Labor (MoEL). The value of social enterprise should not be standardized but diversified. However, the SEPA has limited the scope of the value, the meaning and the boundaries of social enterprise. (DW2, Researcher, U Institute, 10 June 2014, 13:58PM-16:03PM)”

Even bottom-up actors who shared a common background related to civil movements do not fully agree with each other’s ideas concerning the purposes of social enterprise activities and the role of institutionalization. In order to capture the discursive struggles between the two different groups of oppositional actors, I firstly analyzed their discourses based on Van Dijk (1995)’s framework on in-group and out-group identification. Then I analyzed their approaches and strategies in relation to the SEPA by using Schneiberg and Lounsbury (2008)’s extra and intra- institutional force approach in order to examine their interactions with top-down actors and the outcomes of these interactions.