Dialogue as a social practice in healthcare, public health, and social care: A conceptual review and typology

Dialogue is widely invoked across healthcare, public health, and social care, but it is often treated as a neutral communication technique rather than a socially situated and power-laden practice. This conceptual review examines how distinct intellectual traditions configure the purposes, knowledge claims, and power relations of dialogue. A purposive analytic corpus of 49 scholarly sources was developed through database searching, four theoretically distinct seed texts, and iterative backward and forward citation tracking. Sources were mapped across five dimensions: goal, epistemology, power and authority, metaphor, and theoretical roots. Recent literature was then used to update the account of contemporary developments. Drawing on Weberian ideal types, the review identifies four dialogical orientations: deliberative, philosophical, dialogical meetings, and emancipatory. These modes respectively prioritize legitimate decision-making, existential meaning, polyphony and relational safety, and collective agency against structural inequity. The review proposes dialogical mismatch as a sensitizing concept for situations in which an institutionalized mode of engagement is incongruent with participants’ epistemic, existential, relational, or political needs. Such mismatch is presented as a conceptual proposition rather than an empirically established cause of intervention failure. The typology clarifies how dialogue can redistribute epistemic authority but can also become performative, coercive, or depoliticizing. It offers an interdisciplinary framework for empirical research, professional education, organizational design, and critical reflection on digitally mediated and culturally diverse forms of participation.