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Rationale 

The legitimacy of medical social work in clinical settings refers to the professional recognition, institutional acceptance, and operational authority that social workers hold, or seek to attain, within healthcare systems historically organised around biomedical priorities. Legitimacy is not merely a matter of formal credentials or job titles; it is enacted daily through documentation, interdisciplinary meetings, and bedside interactions, where medical social workers continuously justify their presence, define their scope, and demonstrate their distinct contributions to patient care. For clinical practice, legitimacy shapes whether social workers are consulted early or late, whether their assessments inform treatment planning, and whether their interventions are adequately resourced. Without it, medical social workers risk being “relegated” to discharge planning or crisis-only functions; with it, they can address the full biopsychosocial spectrum, including mental health crises, family conflict, care transitions, and advance care planning, among others (e.g. palliative counselling, financial resource navigation, caregiver support). In Chinese societies, where healthcare reform proceeds amid entrenched medical hierarchies, divergent regulatory landscapes, implementation gaps, and ambiguous scope-of-practice definitions, the question of medical social work legitimacy carries urgency.

Aims and Scope

This Special Issue aims to advance theoretical and empirical understanding of medical social work legitimacy in clinical settings across Chinese societies. Rather than treating legitimacy as a fixed attribute or binary status, we conceive of it as dynamic and contested – shaped by institutional structures, professional interactions, policy environments, and discursive practices. Our goal is to assemble papers that illuminate these dimensions, attending equally to constraints and agency.

We invite contributions that engage with legitimacy through – though not limited to – one or more of the following lenses:

• As a problem to be solved – papers that identify barriers to legitimacy (e.g. legal ambiguity, unclear referral pathways, reimbursement exclusion, fragmented training) and propose or evaluate institutional, policy, or educational responses.
• As a process to be described – papers that examine how legitimacy is enacted, negotiated, or eroded in everyday clinical practice, drawing on diverse forms of evidence to capture its temporal and relational dimensions as they unfold across clinical contexts.
• As a discourse to be deconstructed – papers that analyse the language, framing, and power dynamics through which legitimacy is claimed, contested, or denied – whether in policy documents, clinical records, team meetings, or professional narratives. We indeed welcome critical and historical approaches that interrogate how professional boundaries, cultural values, or institutional logics shape what counts as legitimate medical social work practice.

We welcome diverse methodological approaches, including but not limited to case studies, comparative analyses, policy reviews, historical analyses, discourse analysis, and mixed-methods designs. Theoretically, we invite diverse frameworks, including but not limited to institutional theory, boundary work, symbolic interactionism, and field analysis, that illuminate the construction, negotiation, or contestation of legitimacy. Geographically, we invite contributions from or about the Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and other Chinese-majority or diaspora societies where medical social work operates in clinical contexts.

Why Submit?

• Visibility: This Special Issue offers a dedicated platform examining medical social work legitimacy in clinical settings across Chinese societies, bringing scholarly attention to a rapidly evolving area of health social work.
• Impact: By centring legitimacy as a lived challenge for social work practitioners, the issue can generate actionable insights for clinical practice, education, and institutional advocacy.
• Dialogue: Though anchored in Chinese contexts, the concerns we pose engage global debates over professional boundaries, scope of practice, and interprofessional recognition, bridging regional scholarship with international health social work discourse.

 Submission Guidelines

• Submission Deadline: 30 June 2027
  • Manuscripts should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length and must be submitted electronically via the journal’s official submission portal at https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcsw20
• Formatting and Style
  • Detailed formatting instructions are available under the Instructions for Authors section on the journal’s website - https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rcsw20

Publication schedule: April 2028; Volume 21, Issue 1; Accepted papers will be published online first.

Guest Editors

Dr Bo LI

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

[email protected] 

Prof. Jiong TU

Sun Yat-sen University

[email protected] 

Prof. Chengpu YU

Sun Yat-sen University

[email protected] 

Prof. Juan CHEN

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

[email protected]

Contact Us 

For general enquiries, please call +852 2766 7725, or send an email to [email protected].