Session: Social Welfare Evidence Ecosystems: The Central Yet Overlooked Role of Organizations (Society for Social Work and Research 28th Annual Conference - Recentering & Democratizing Knowledge: The Next 30 Years of Social Work Science)

Social welfare operates within an evidence ecosystem, one in which policy, practice, and scholarship increasingly focus on questions of evidence: what counts as evidence, who is a credible evidence producer and broker, how to use evidence to shape policy, and how to effectively implement evidence in practice. Relatively little attention has been paid to organizations as mezzo-level actors influencing evidence practices and to what effect. Taking the organization as its focus, this symposium explores how various organizational types may construct, maintain, and/or intervene in both micro-level evidence practices and macro-level structures setting the conditions for evidence production and circulation. Papers center how social welfare organizations negotiate, and often reify, knowledge hierarchies and racialized evidence engagement in policy and practice. We take as our conceptual anchor the idea of an evidence ecosystem populated by various organizational actors (and the workers embedded in them). Organizations occupy different, perhaps multiple, positions within this ecosystem, shaping and being shaped by it in various ways. For example, evidence producers (e.g., universities, community-based organizations) construct evidence to claim effectiveness and importance of interventions; service providers engage evidence in daily practice ideally to provide responsive services; brokers (e.g., advocacy organizations) generate and/or circulate evidence to influence policy and practice; and rule setting organizations (e.g., state agencies) set the parameters and regulations for what counts as evidence in policy. Each symposium paper will serve as a case study for how an organizational type negotiates both the evidence ecosystem and a certain evidence type: experimental evidence. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic field work, Presenter 1 will take us inside an evidence producer, exploring how research, criminal-legal, and community organizations implementing a randomized controlled trial (RCT) negotiate the political tensions of evidence-making for an overdose prevention intervention. Offering a provider perspective, Presenter 2's case study from a nonprofit's team-based case-management RCT reveals the unique organizational administrative burdens and potentially perverse organizational legitimacy incentives posed by RCT evaluations of nonprofit human service organizations. Presenter 3 uses a critical discourse analysis of public facing reports produced a century apart to interrogate how non-government organizations, functioning as brokers, have mobilized racialized experimental evidence to influence social work practice over time. Finally, via a longitudinal qualitative case study spanning two years, Presenter 4 follows the introduction of a novel policy rule setter - a clearinghouse narrowly defining practice effectiveness as experimental evidence - and how implementing organizations' concerns about inequitable treatment of evidence and associated implementation requirements delegitimized this policy tool. Together, these papers 1) locate organizations enmeshed in various parts of the social welfare evidence ecosystem, including research, policy, and practice; 2) interrogate organizations' evidence engagements via multiple methods, including ethnography, critical-historical approaches, and qualitative interviews; and 3) offer critical reflections on the central, yet often overlooked, role of organizations in cultivating evidence ecosystems that honor evidentiary pluralism and advance anti-oppressive work.