ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of the 'cultural turn' in relation to social welfare. It argues that focusing on issues of social welfare reveals important intersections between social, cultural and political changes in relation to the welfare state and analytical developments in the study of social policy. The chapter suggests that the 'cultural turn' needs to be understood as embedded in both sets of developments. The cultural turn in social policy has centred on the recovery of social circumstances from the realm of Nature and the remaking of them as elements of the Social. The cultural turn highlights the temporary, fragile or contingent quality of specific social constructions. The capacity of words, meanings, constructions and identities to be fluid or polyvalent is a central feature of the 'cultural turn'. The focal point of social policy in practice and the academic study of social policy has been this conception of the 'social' - a specific classificatory schema of social inequality.
