본 연구는 2007년 사회적기업육성법이 제정된 지 10년을 맞는 시점에서 ʻ우리나라에서 사회적기업은 지속가능한가?ʼ라는 의문에서 출발하여 사회적기업의 지속가능요인에 대한 심층적인 실증 연구를 통해 다음의 세 가지 목적을 달성하고자 한다. 첫째, 사회적기업의 정체성에 대한 규명 및 지속가능성에 대한 통합적인 사회학 이론체계를 통해 사회적기업의 지속가능성에 영향을 미치는 다양한 요인들을 탐색할 것이다. 둘째, 탐색된 요인들이 어떻게 지속가능성에 영향을 미치는지, 각 요인별 영향력 우선순위 및 요인들 간의 영향관계를 알아보고자 한다. 마지막으로 사회적기업의 지속가능성 영향요인을 심도 있게 파악하기 위해 사회적기업 종사자와 사회적기업의 정책집행기관인 공공기관 종사자를 대상으로 사회적기업에 대한 설문조사를 통하여 두 집단 간 인식차이를 비교·분석할 것이다. 이를 통해 향후 우리나라 사회적기업의 지속가능한 발전 방안 및 중·장기적인 육성정책 대안을 제시하는 것을 연구의 목적으로 삼는다. 연구모형은 시회학자인 기든스의 구조화 이론을 적용하여 구조적 요인과 행위적 요인을 통해 사회적기업의 지속가능성 영향요인을 종합적으로 분석하고자 한다. 본 연구 결과는 사회적기업의 구조적 요인과 행위적 요인은 지속가능성에 유의미한 정(+)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타났다. 사회적기업의 구조적 요인과 행위적 요인은 서로 정(+)의 영향을 미치는 것으로 분석되었다. 사회적기업의 지속가능성 구성요소인 경제적·사회적·환경적 지속가능성은 독립변수의 설명력과 회귀계수에 대한 검정력 모두 매우 높은 것으로 분석되었다.
This study started from a question, ʻIs social enterprise sustainable in Korea?.ʼ ʻSocial enterprise promotion lawʼ 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. Giddensʼs 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.