Has Social Work Experienced a Cultural Turn? A Multi-Corpus Empirical Exploration

This article examines whether social work has experienced a genuine "cultural turn" in its disciplinary knowledge production.

The study draws on a Web of Science and Scopus corpus of 41,713 social work articles published between 1979 and 2025, including a cultur-indexed subcorpus of 5,442 explicitly culture-focused studies. It combines longitudinal trend analysis, changepoint detection, lexical classification, topic modeling, co-occurrence mapping, and methodological profiling.

Findings reveal a modest but stabilizing increase in culture-related terminology over time, with no evidence of a structural break in disciplinary trajectories. Cultural discourse is dominated by managerial and competence-based frameworks and remains structurally anchored to mental health, education, risk, and service-delivery regimes. Critical, decolonial, and epistemic-justice vocabularies and methods remain marginal.

Even within explicitly culture-oriented scholarship, culture functions primarily as a technical adjustment variable rather than as a disruptive epistemic force. The persistence of instrumental and professionalized uses of culture indicates continuity rather than transformation in the field's epistemic foundations.

The study concludes that social work has institutionalized and professionalized culture without undergoing an epistemic transformation. Rather than evidencing a cultural turn, the discipline exhibits a pattern of cultural accommodation, with implications for theory, education, research practice, and future decolonizing projects.