Governance in South Korean social enterprises

Purpose – The aim of the present study is to identify the prevalent model of social enterprise governance in South Korea by empirically testing five conceptual models. Theoretical and empirical research on the governance of social enterprises have grown considerably in the past decade, centred primarily on the UK, Europe and the USA. Whilst some articles have discussed the role and growth of social enterprises in Asia, the empirical evidence remains scant, particularly in relation to empirical studies of social enterprise governance in South Korea. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing upon established literature on social enterprise governance, we empirically tested five conceptual models on a sample of 69 South Korean social enterprises collected through an online survey to identify the prevalent model of governance. Such models were found unable to fully explain governance processes observed. Thus, the authors used an innovative statistical technique, latent class analysis, which identifies clusters of associations between key governance variables. Findings – This exercise revealed two opposite models, centralising and interdependent. The latter represent an interesting shift towards widening forms of participation in governance processes in South Korea. Research limitations/implications – The sample is small and only limited to some social enterprise types. More research needs to be done on larger samples including the growing South Korean co-operative sector. Originality/value – To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first published data available on the governance of South Korean social enterprises and the analysis used to identify governance models (i.e. latent class analysis) is novel.