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

PURPOSE: This article examines whether social work has experienced a genuine "cultural turn" in its disciplinary knowledge production. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 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. RESULTS: 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. DISCUSSION: 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. CONCLUSION: 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.