What does it take for an organisation to use evidence?
Third sector providers can be expected to demonstrate outcomes while working under contracts that leave limited time and funding for analysis. This review examines whether evidence-use problems can be understood partly through those commissioning arrangements, rather than solely through a lack of practitioner skills.
It distinguishes evidence capacity, the funded conditions and routines needed to handle evidence, from evidence use, what people do with it in a decision.
The argument developed in the review
The synthesis proposes two connected tensions. First, audit-ready knowledge can gain legitimacy while the organisations expected to produce it lack analytical resources. Second, multiple accountability demands can direct limited capacity towards contract reporting instead of learning.
Under these conditions, tacit and relational knowledge may receive less attention because it fits formal reporting requirements poorly. The contract is examined as a possible mechanism linking policy expectations to everyday evidence practice.
Ask what the contract funds, what it measures and what kind of learning it permits.
This is a practical implication of the review’s argument, rather than a tested intervention.
How the review was conducted
The paper reports a critical interpretive synthesis of 47 sources spanning public administration, organisational theory, social enterprise research and implementation science. Its six theoretical lenses examine absorption of knowledge, learning, sensemaking, tacit and explicit knowledge, hybridity and knowledge mobilisation.
It develops a framework across the policy paradigm, commissioning regime and delivery organisation. The purpose is to explain possible mechanisms and their conditions, rather than calculate a pooled effect.
What it does not establish
This is a single-reviewer literature synthesis, not a completed empirical doctoral study. The framework has not established the prevalence, causal direction or relative strength of the proposed mechanisms.
Internal governance, leadership and culture remain alternative or interacting explanations. The paper does not justify attributing evidence-use problems to commissioning alone.
Questions for research and practice
- Is analytical time funded, or absorbed into delivery work?
- Which forms of knowledge count in the commissioning relationship?
- Can evidence change the service, or only document compliance?
- How would we distinguish a contractual constraint from an internal governance problem?
Based on Phil Pegram’s DBA literature review, module OBE5015-N-1. This is a plain-language account of that academic submission, not a peer-reviewed publication. Contact me to discuss the methodology or underlying paper.