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Has Social Work Experienced a Cultural Turn? A Multi-Corpus Empirical Exploration.
1Department of Social Work, Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University, Ankara, Türkiye.
Journal of Evidence-Based Social Work (2019)
|April 21, 2026
Summary
Social work has integrated cultural concepts but not transformed its core knowledge. The discipline shows cultural accommodation, not a genuine "cultural turn," impacting its future direction.
Area of Science:
- Social Sciences
- Sociology
- Cultural Studies
Background:
- The concept of a "cultural turn" suggests a fundamental shift in disciplinary focus towards culture.
- Social work's engagement with cultural concepts has been debated, questioning its depth and impact.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate whether social work has undergone a significant "cultural turn" in its knowledge production.
- To analyze the evolution and nature of cultural discourse within social work scholarship.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of a large corpus (41,713 articles) from Web of Science and Scopus (1979-2025).
- Utilized longitudinal trend analysis, changepoint detection, lexical classification, topic modeling, and co-occurrence mapping.
- Examined a subcorpus of 5,442 explicitly culture-focused studies.
Main Results:
- A modest, stabilizing increase in culture-related terminology was observed, without evidence of a structural break.
- Cultural discourse is primarily framed by managerial and competence-based approaches, linked to mental health, education, risk, and service delivery.
- Critical, decolonial, and epistemic justice perspectives remain marginalized within the discourse.
Conclusions:
- Social work has institutionalized and professionalized the concept of culture without a fundamental epistemic transformation.
- The discipline demonstrates cultural accommodation rather than a transformative "cultural turn."
- This pattern has implications for social work theory, education, research, and decolonizing efforts.
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