“Because now it’s all about the numbers”: How Can the Third Sector Learn from Social Workers’ Contestations of Evidence Regimes?

• In Event: Accountability and Contestation in Social Work

Abstract

Global crises like climate change, migration, and precarious economies hit third sector human service organizations (HSOs) particularly hard, and social workers are frequently at the front lines. Yet, these are not the only crises to which the social work field and third sector must respond. In the United States, top-down policies and funding mechanisms increasingly utilize an institutionalized evidence hierarchy, atop which sits experimental evidence, to determine “what works” (Haskins & Margolis, 2014). This evidence regime creates conditions that stretch a third sector with scarce resources, constrain values-driven contributions, and delimit possible solutions–generating hidden yet ongoing crises that substantially impact our most vulnerable communities (Frumkin & Andre-Clark, 2000; Gambrill, 2006).

Organizational learning is one answer to the question of how social work, as a field largely located in third sector HSOs implementing social welfare policy in the US, can shape, contest, and respond to this evidence regime (Mosley, Marwell, and Ybarra, 2019). To explore this proposition, we draw on participant observation and interview data (N ≈ 400 hours and 50+ interviews) from four longitudinal, multi-modal qualitative case studies in four unique policy domains (homelessness, child welfare, poverty-reduction, college access) to offer initial empirical answers to the questions: 1) How do human service organizations learn? 2) How does the field of social work uniquely contribute to organizational learning? 3) How does third sector learning become policy change?

We conceptualize the contemporary U.S. social welfare evidence regime as an institution both structuring and reproduced through organizations’ and workers’ everyday routines (Powell & Colyvas, 2008). One way organizations learn about and from this evidence regime is through workers’ sensemaking and sensebreaking experiences – the social processes that stabilize and/or rupture how we fashion stories about why we think, believe, and act in certain ways (Gilstrap et al., 2016; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1995; 2006; Wenger, 2009). We analyzed data treating social workers as sensemakers, people navigating complex professional dilemmas where feelings and thoughts are unclear and decisions and actions are improvised (Helms Mills, et al., 2010).

We find that: 1) Implementation of policies that constrain legitimate forms of evidence and, therefore, reduce eclecticism, adaptation, and discretion in social workers’ practice produce sense breaks, 2) these new policy constraints create new politics for social workers to articulate questions about the value or fit of evidence used within their contexts, 3) social work’s commitment to praxis (spirited action and reflection) uniquely positions social workers to identify points of friction in evidence use and engage them for organizational learning and administrative policy feedback (Shaikh, et. al, 2022).

Yet, we find novelty alone does not ensure organizational learning or systemic policy change. Many pressures inherent to the third sector’s role in crisis response prevent institutionalization or diffusion of learning beyond individuals. While sensebreaking provides analytic windows for social workers’ learning, we argue the third sector must recognize disruptions to social workers’ routines as sensemaking opportunities to contest, stretch, and shape an increasingly rigid evidence regime within which they are embedded.

References

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Haskins, R., & Margolis, G. (2014). Show me the evidence: Obama’s fight for rigor and results in social policy. Brookings Institution Press.

Frumkin, P., & Andre-Clark, A. (2000). When missions, markets, and politics collide: Values and strategy in the nonprofit human services. Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly, 29(1_suppl), 141-163.

Gambrill, E. (2006). Evidence-Based Practice and Policy: Choices Ahead. Research on Social Work Practice, 16(3), 338–357.

Gilstrap, C. A., Gilstrap, C. M., Holderby, K. N., & Valera, K. M. (2016). Sensegiving, leadership, and nonprofit crises: How nonprofit leaders make and give sense to organizational crisis. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 27, 2787-2806.

Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57-125.

Mosley, J. E., Marwell, N. P., & Ybarra, M. (2020). How the “what works” movement is failing human service organizations, and what social work can do to fix it. In The future of human service organizational & management research (pp. 100-109). Routledge.

Shaikh, S. S., LeFrançois, B. A., & Macías, T. (Eds.). (2022). Critical social work praxis. Fernwood Publishing.

Weick, K. E. (2006). Faith, evidence, and action: Better guesses in an unknowable world. Organization studies, 27(11), 1723-1736.

Wenger, E. (2009). A social theory of learning. Contemporary theories of learning, 209-218.

Authors

• Bridgette Davis, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Ariel Maschke