Welfare state and the social economy in compressed development: Self‐sufficiency organizations in South Korea

Published date01 December 2021
AuthorSang Hun Lim
Date01 December 2021
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1964
Received: 14 April 2020
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Revised: 14 July 2021
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Accepted: 25 October 2021
DOI: 10.1002/pad.1964
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Welfare state and the social economy in compressed
development: Selfsufficiency organizations in South Korea
Sang Hun Lim
Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea
Correspondence
Lim Sang Hun, Kyung Hee University, Seoul,
South Korea.
Email: limsanghun@khu.ac.kr
Funding information
National Research Foundation of Korea,
Grant/Award Number: NRF
2019S1A5C2A02083124; Ministry of
Education
Abstract
Current studies tend to theorize the relationship between the social economy (SE)
and social policy based on the experiences of Western welfare states, missing the
evolution of social economy organizations (SEOs) in later developing, transitional
welfare states. This article fills this gap by examining selfsufficiency organizations
in South Korea, which originated from urban SEOs but became agents for micro-
business startups under the newly introduced universalistic public assistance
scheme. To explain this evolutionary trajectory, this article applies a concept of
“compressed development,” where different stages of development coexist. The
compressed industrialization created large informal sectors and rudimentary com-
munity movements in urban slums. The compressed universalization of public
assistance promoted urban community movements as agents of the workfare
through microbusiness startups outside the regular labor market. This article ar-
gues that the speed and timing of industrialization and welfare development need to
be considered in studies of the SE in a transitional welfaremix.
KEYWORDS
compressed development, selfsufficiency organization, social economy, welfare state, welfare
mix
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INTRODUCTION
As a response to social and economic exclusion, the social economy
(SE) has been promoted as an agent of activation across different
welfare regimes. However, there remain crossnational differences in
the institutional forms and aims of social economy organizations
(SEOs). SEOs may take different forms, such as cooperatives, social
businesses, entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations and public
sector social enterprises (Defourny & Nyssens, 2017). Moreover,
SEOs' activities encompass different types of interventions and ob-
jectives in relation to people's economic participation, such as inte-
gration into the mainstream labor market, provision of an alternative
to market employment, social integration, and skill training (Cooney
et al., 2016; Noya & Clarence, 2007).
As social welfare is a major sector for the SE, scholars have
attempted to explain the different shapes of SEOs in relation to
different types of welfare regimes. However, these studies deal
mainly with established welfare states in the West that lie within
EspingAndersen's (1990) “three worlds of welfare capitalism.”
Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to how the development of
SEOs is shaped by welfare systems in developmental and transitional
contexts. Despite the arguments about welfare state retrenchment,
the regional boundary of the welfare state has kept expanding
(Kuhnle et al., 2019, p. 2). In East Asia, such as in South Korea
(hereafter, Korea), Taiwan, and, to some extent, Japan, rightsbased
universalistic welfare states were introduced and/or further devel-
oped around the late 20
th
century in the era of activation and pri-
vatization (Kim, 2016; Kwon, 2005; Peng, 2005; Takegawa, 2009;
Wong, 2004). Thus, one unresolved question concerns: How is the SE
within the general activation policy paradigm shaped in transitional
contexts where a rightsbased welfare state is established at a much later
time?
Public Admin Dev. 2021;41:267278. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pad © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
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