Stat och kommun träffade 2010 en grundöverenskommelse om att införa en evidensbaserad praktik inom socialtjänsten. Sedan dess har överenskommelsen preciserats, en process som analyseras i denna artikel. Som vi kommer att visa återstår betydande oklarheter som det sociala arbetets aktörer behöver klargöra via förhandlingar. Detta är ett numera vanligt sätt att söka implementera politik och vi diskuterar konsekvenserna av en sådan ambition.

Since starting over a hundred years ago social work has been occupied with the division into academic and practical knowledge. A common theme in scientific journals of social work is how this gap can be understood and resolved. The initial purpose of this article was to carry out a systematic review to find out if and how the gap could be bridged. Because few independent studies could be found, the study instead took the form of a scoping review with more included articles. The results show concrete suggestions as to how to bridge the gap, but also three discourses with dissimilar problem definitions and solutions. The emergence of proposals such as the evidence-based practice and its diverse combinations, the formation of new institutions, and today’s globalisation triggers this fragmentation. The consequences are vast confusions of opinions and explanations which illustrate competing knowledge positions. The authors propose that researchers and practitioners should orient themselves in this landscape when building bridges between academia and practice. Instead of taking the research–practice gap for granted, they suggest that social work should relate more closely to these three discourses.

The concepts of evidence and evidence-based practice in social work travel fast around the world these days. Evidence-based practice presupposes evidence-based decision-making. In the debate it is argued that a social work fashioned after evidence should be more rational, less authoritarian and built on scientific knowledge, respect and ethics. Yet the empirical evidence that this idea works is weak. In fact the difficulties to implement evidence could be a sound reaction. But difficulties experienced could also be a defensive organizational reaction to a new, disturbing technology. In this article James D. Thompson's classical study Organizations in Action from 1967 is applied to evidence-based decision-making in social work. It shows to date that many problems have been given, at best, tenuous attention. It is argued that focus on evidence will raise ambiguity and complexity within organizations and that new professional specialists will emerge. Further, new constellations of power will appear, leading to a change of balance within the domains of social work.

This multiple case study examines how the idea of using risk assessment tools is manifested and processed in Swedish social services. Based on the analysis of interviews with different stakeholders and of organizational documents in two social service organizations, we investigate the actors who control local risk assessment practices. The findings illustrate that a relatively small group of social workers in the organizations have been able to forward their claims and decide how risk assessment work should be carried out without much intrusion from local managers or politicians. The findings also validate other studies that found that increased standardization can strengthen social workers’ ability to perform their professional task rather than lead to de-professionalization. This article ends with a discussion of what risk assessment practices might mean for domestic violence victims.

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