An Ethnographic Study on Unraveling of a Social Innovation Project for North Korean Refugees

Social innovation projects must address fundamental uncertainties that plague any attempts to create novel and value-generating organizational arrangements. In this sense, social innovation is no different than other entrepreneurial activities. Our ethnography of a South Korean social innovation project documents how the project unsuccessfully navigated the heightening uncertainty around its fledgling initiative and ultimately failed. Specifically, with the aim of nurturing self-reliance among North Korean Refugees in South Korea (NKRs hereafter), the project built a social franchise of ramen noodle restaurants. Due to its innovative design that minimized risks for the NKR beneficiaries, the project initially demonstrated a notable success for the first couple years. But soon after, during our ethnographic engagement, the project quickly crumbled and wound up being a dramatic failure. Our in-depth analysis of this process reveals that underlying such a sudden collapse were the interactional dynamics between South Korean social entrepreneurs and NKR beneficiaries. Both parties faced a “double bind”—a situation of being confronted with two irreconcilable demands—and it generated patterns of entrepreneur-beneficiary interaction detrimental to the project’s adaptation to the changing environment. By theorizing these findings, we aim to advance the understanding around how social innovation projects navigate entrepreneurial uncertainties.