The development of social work education in South Korea: a historical review

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social work education is a major institutional mechanism for providing trained and capable professionals who can ensure the profession’s accountability to public interests. In many countries, through enacting laws and issuing policies, the state plays an important role in shaping the training and preparation of professional social workers. Despite the significant role of the state in shaping social work education, this topic has attracted little attention in the literature. Informed by an historical institutionalism perspective, in this paper, we examine how the state shapes social work education in South Korea, a systematic introduction which is rarely found in the English literature. Looking at its development process, we suggest that social work education in South Korea has been shaped by and positioned as an institutional mechanism to support the development of its welfare regime.