Policy Design and Achieving Social Outcomes: A Comparative Analysis of Social Enterprise Policy

Abstract

This article compares American, British, and Korean social enterprise policies to explore how government policy design shapes social enterprises and how “social benefit” and “public value” are defined. A social enterprise is defined as the legally structured organizational pursuit of blending social purpose and economic profit through business activities, and examples from each country are presented. Applying Bozeman's publicness theory, the authors demonstrate the wide range of roles that governments play in shaping social enterprises' ownership, funding, and control across the three countries using regulations, subsidies, and procurement policies. These roles may affect the impact of social enterprises in society. The case studies show that the U.S. approach to social enterprise policy is heavily market oriented, while the United Kingdom is in the middle of the market‐to‐publicness continuum, and South Korea is much closer to the publicness (government‐dominated) end of the continuum.

Social entrepreneurship in context: pathways for new contributions in the field

“…Another important stakeholder of social entrepreneurship are the people who consume the products or services sold by social enterprises, or the consumers (Hibbert et al, 2005;Tsai et al, 2020). Policymakers are also key stakeholders of social entrepreneurship (e.g., Choi et al, 2020;Nicholls & Teasdale, 2017) and have begun to receive attention in the field.…”

Can Infused Publicness Enhance Public Value Creation? Examining the Impact of Government Funding on the Performance of Social Enterprises in South Korea

“…In addition, this study is based on the Korean case, which not only has a balanced model of social enterprise between social economy–based European and market-oriented American approaches (Lee, 2015) but also promotes flexibility by allowing a variety of legal entities to become social enterprises instead of requiring social enterprises to choose a specific legal type (D. Choi et al, 2020).…”

“…Other social enterprise researchers have conducted comparative analyses of social enterprises between countries to understand their diversity and complexity (D. Choi et al, 2020; Defourny & Nyssens, 2017; Kerlin, 2009, 2017).…”

Responding to failure: the promise of market mending for social enterprise

“…If governments want to provide ongoing support to market mending social enterprises, they can do so through vouchers that subsidize consumers for their purchases. Social enterprise policymakers can also facilitate and incentivize the creation of social enterprise ecosystems that support market mending by helping to funnel private investment into these enterprises (Choi, Berry, and Ghadimi 2020). For instance, policymakers could encourage socially responsible investment options through tax benefits for investors, social impact bonds, or the creation of a social stock exchange as seen in the UK.…”