사회적기업의 구조화와 지속가능성 요인에 관한 실증 연구

Abstract

This study started from a question, “Is social enterprise sustainable in Korea?.” 'Social enterprise promotion law' was created to generate employment opportunities for vulnerable social group and provide social service in 2007. Since then, various government-driven policies and financial aids programs have been implemented with a great deal of budgets. However, despite of remarkable growth of the quantity of social enterprises, the sustainability of social enterprise is still skeptical in terms of it quality. Recently, whether social enterprise is sustainable has become an important issue in government, academics, and social economy. The purpose of this study is three-fold. First, the current study will examine various factors affecting the sustainability of social enterprise through integrating sociology theory system and identification of social enterprise. Second, the study will investigate how factors influence sustainability of social enterprise and interactions among factors while prioritizing such factors. Lastly, the current study will compare and contrast opinion of two groups (i.e., social enterprise employees and social enterprise policy execution employees) on sustainability of social enterprise with a survey method. The main purpose of the study is to provide implications for policy-making when it comes to short-term and long-term policy for the growth of social enterprise. Giddens’s structuration theory, the key theory in sociology, was applied to explore three study objectives and provided theoretical background in this study. Structuration theory suggests two categories for factors of sustainability. External factor is structural factors while internal factor is behavioral factors. Structural factors include social-economic factor, market-type factor, and government policy factor whereas behavioral factors include personnel factor, organizational factor, and stakeholder factor. The survey method was adopted to test proposed hypotheses. The study questionnaire is composed of two parts. First, each case was analyzed by structured interview in the narrative form. Online survey and in-depth interview were conducted both in the pretest and the main study. A total of 149 people (96 participants from social enterprise employees and 53 participants from social enterprise policy execution employees) participated in the study. Before testing proposed hypotheses, frequency test, reliability, validity test, and correlation were conducted. To test proposed hypotheses a series of regression independent sample t-tests were conducted. The study results are as follow. First, structural factor of social enterprise partially affect the sustainability. Second, the government policy factor has a statistically significant impact on the sustainability but social economic factor does not, showing a contrast. Second, all behavioral factors of social enterprise are known to have an impact on the sustainability. Third, it is known that structural and behavioral factors of social enterprise are correlated, showing high degree of correlation. Fourth, correlations were very high among the sustainability factors of social enterprise such as economic, social, and environmental sustainability factor. Fifth, the statistical significance was found between public institution and social enterprise employees on factors for the sustainability. In terms of structural factor, public institution employees view socio-economic factor more important than social enterprise employees whereas there was no statistical significance on perspectives of government policy. In terms of behavioral factor, social enterprise employees view personnel factor, organizational factor, and strategic factor more important than public institution employees. In addition, the sustainability which consists of these three factors were viewed more important than public institution employees and statistical significances between two groups were also found.