Adopting Social Justice as Nothing More than an Academic Jargon: Conceptualisation of Social Justice in Social Work and Social Policy Disciplines

A just society is not one where everyone is absolutely equal on all terms, nor scholarly literature on social justice is constrained by such a conception of the just. As observed from the broad scholarly literature of social justice, most theories in this field are competing and contending normative political perspectives informed by a sociological conception of inequalities and aiming to identify social, economic as well as institutional conditions under which resulting inequalities are morally necessary and desired, rather than proposing absolute equality. This work primarily aims to explore to what extent this foundational quality of social justice theories is adopted by peer-reviewed scholarly articles published in Türkiye within disciplines of social work and social policy whose identifying characteristic is to serve the establishment of the just society. Departing from this purpose, it methodologically employed a double-layered systematic literature review (n=184) and qualitative content analysis (n=62) to critically scrutinise peer-reviewed journal articles involving the concept of social justice. In addition to some complementary findings, these analyses resulted in three major findings based on which we argue that social justice in Türkiye is (1) primarily addressed as a part of the popular academic jargon along with some generic concepts such as human rights and welfare; (2) interchangeably used with the concept of equality although there are substantial distinctions between them; and (3) stressed in a way that there is a unified/homogenous conception of the just society that overlooks competing and contending normative perspectives in the relevant literature.