Dynamics of social economy self-organized on social media: following social entrepreneur forum and social economy network on Facebook

Abstract

Since the Korean government enacted the Social Enterprise Promotion Act of 2007 aiming to foster and support social enterprises, discourse on the social economy has proliferated both quantitatively and qualitatively. One explanation for this phenomenon is that government-driven policies have dominantly led social enterprises to the ecology of the social economy. To cope with pernicious issues such as unemployment, growing demand for welfare, and the widening gap between rich and poor, however, it cannot be discounted that social activists and nonprofits also have facilitated the development of social enterprises by building online and offline networks. To fill this niche of applying these concepts to the Asian context, this research aims to investigate the ecology of the social economy by analyzing critical stakeholders and keywords embedded in self-organizing networks on social media. This case is critical and attractive to researchers and practitioners not only because the discourse on social economy has not been fully examined but also because self-organizing networks on social media act as social capital among stakeholders and thus offer valuable insights into dealing with the enduring problems that government-driven policies seem unsolvable. By analyzing the evolution of self-organizing social economy networks and social entrepreneurs on Facebook, this research provides policy implications for other Asian countries with underdeveloped social economies and theoretically contributes to the field of public policy analysis and management.