Entrepreneurship and Consumerism in Korea"s Customized Welfare Services : Critical Study on the Market-originated Identities of Public Welfare Actors
Kim, Suyoung ] Seoul National University
Abstract
The purpose of this study is to delineate the confusions and conflicts experienced by frontline welfare bureaucrats as market-oriented identities are introduced into public welfare administration. With the market principles applied to public administration recently, public officials and welfare recipients have started to be re-identified as pubic entrepreneurs and welfare customers respectively. Korea's Customized Community Welfare Services(CCWS) is also aimed at increasing customer satisfaction with welfare recipients by intensifying frontier spirit of welfare officials when providing welfare services for recipients. However, this study raises questions about whether the market-originated concepts will really facilitate the efficient distribution of public welfare services. Based on in-depth interviews with 11 welfare officials involved in CCWS, this paper addresses the side effects of applying entrepreneurship and consumerism to public welfare administration. Firstly, First, it describes how the emphasis on pioneering spirit leaves the whole burden of providing services to welfare officials. Secondly, it reveals how consumerism threatens fair delivery of welfare services and aggravates welfare dependency. In doing so, this study claims that injecting private sector logics within the public sector could undermine the intrinsic values of public welfare administration.
key words : new public management, customized welfare services, customized welfare team, integrated case management, welfare blind spots
Journal of Korean social welfare administration 20(4), 2018.11, 175-211