Changing Welfare Mix and Discretion Mix in Social Care Services in South Korea

Social care services have been rapidly restructured over the last two decades. This chapter addresses the question of how to understand these changes with theoretical concepts of welfare mix and discretion mix. While the “welfare-mix” approach has been widely adopted in social care literature, it often fails to capture the role of autonomy and decision-making power in systems of social care. To fill that gap, we extend the concept of discretion- a certain degree of freedom to decide what is to be done in a particular situation- to examine the transformation of social care services in the era of aging and austerity. Care discretion, defined as the freedom and authority to decide how much care and what type of care is to be provided from whom, tends to be unevenly distributed between legislative branch actors, central government executive branch actors, local governments, street-level bureaucrats, care providers, and care recipients. This chapter uses the case of long-term care (LTC) services to investigate how aging and austerity pressures have transformed the discretion mix as well as the welfare mix in one important area of Korean social policy implementation. It also discusses why the discretion mix can be a useful complementary concept for analyzing the changing landscape of social care services.