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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.
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Notes on contributors
Jin Ah Lee
Jin Ah Lee is as associate professor of Catholic University of Pusan Department of Social Welfare and Counseling. Her main research interests include social work for the elderly and community care.
Miu Chung Yan
Miu Chung Yan is a professor of the University of British Columbia School of Social Work. He has studied and written extensively about North-South social work knowledge transfer and indigenization of social work practice and education.