High social worker turnover is a serious challenge to the social work organizations in Guangdong Province in Mainland China. Little is understood about the relationship between the social workers’ satisfaction with organizational career management (OCM) and their turnover intentions. A quantitative survey was undertaken to gather information from 212 registered social workers employed by 43 social work organizations in eleven cities in Guangdong Province. This study reveals that social workers’ satisfaction with OCM had significant influence on turnover intentions. Implications of the study are discussed and further research can explore social workers’ career aspirations and its relation to participation in OCM practices.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, Social Workers across Borders (SWAB) was invited to organise crisis intervention training and supervisions for volunteer counselling teams. By reviewing the supervision records this paper found that the steps of ‘Sensitisation, Education, Scanning, Choice of Opting Out, and Recovery Facilitation’ (S-E-S-C-R) are useful to structure Trauma-Informed Supervision. Analysis indicated that volunteer counsellors have gone through three different stages, namely confusion, coordination and adaptation to changing crisis situations.

Ubuntu generally means humanity. It is an African philosophy and a principle that is being promoted by the international bodies of social work. Like other Western knowledge, its capacity for indigenisation should be a shared interest nowadays. This article assesses the utilisation of Ubuntu for a rural development programme in China. It illustrates Ubuntu’s unique perspectives about traditional values and human relationships for promoting a holistic understanding of professional practice. The implications encourage further discoveries of various potential uses of Ubuntu in respective localities for developing a polythetic community of international social work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been shaping Chinese social workers to contribute to public health. To study the details, this article aims to explore the roles of social workers during the pandemic in China’s mainland and how social workers fulfilled their roles. The study used a cross-sectional design with a convergent parallel-mixed methodology. Its findings provide another piece of evidence demonstrating the functions of social work practitioners during a health crisis worldwide. However, the ambiguities of the social work profession in addressing public health emergencies were also unveiled in the case of China.

The COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in front line social workers experiencing job stress, burnout and other psychological distress. Little is known about the work-related stress experienced by Chinese social workers during the pandemic. This study focused on the job stress of social workers from Mainland and Macao. The research aims of this study included: (1) testing whether there is a difference in job stress between social workers from Mainland and Macao during the pandemic and (2) identifying mediating factors that helped explain such regional differences. An online survey collected data from 292 social workers in Mainland China and 108 from Macao in 2020. Mainland participants reported significantly higher job stress than Macao participants. Regional differences in job stress amongst Mainland and Macao social workers were partially attributed to their age and professional role identity. More attention needs to be paid to social workers in Mainland China as they experience higher job stress than their counterparts from Macao. Future research is needed to examine other factors (e.g. job demand and financial compensation) that may contribute to such regional differences.

Social washing refers to the strategic exaggeration or misrepresentation of an organisation’s commitment to social responsibility, ethical governance, or social impact without corresponding substantive action. It typically operates through selective disclosure, symbolic initiatives, or performative communication that aligns the organisation with socially desirable values—such as equity, human rights, community development, or inclusion—while underlying practices remain unchanged, weakly evidenced, or contradictory. The concept belongs to the wider family of “washing” phenomena associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) frameworks, especially the difficult-to-measure social (“S”) pillar. By contrast, authentic accountability refers to governance and reporting practices that connect institutional commitments to verifiable social outcomes and discernible improvements in human well-being. The institutionalisation of ESG frameworks has raised expectations of corporate responsibility while also enlarging the scope for reputational manipulation. Within this setting, social washing has become relevant not only to social policy and sustainable development debates, but also to corporate governance, ESG evaluation, and cross-sector partnership practice. This entry examines how organisations construct narratives of social responsibility that do not necessarily correspond to substantive social outcomes. It also argues that such distortions matter both for welfare systems and civil-society actors and for ESG assessment, reputational signalling, and the interpretation of social performance in market settings.