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With material from a Swedish study of the utilization of social research in city welfare agencies, the author advocate a sociological analysis of the utilization contexts where use of research takes place. The bases of compliance in the organization and the position of the agencies in regard to conflicts in social welfare politics are shown to have great importance for the way organizations use and invest in knowledge, and case studies show that these factors can change the type of impact of research. The language of current utilization research tends to treat differences in research use as quantitative differences or as differences in the “functions” or “modes” of research use. The authors point to the hierarchical distribution of knowledge and research use, the activity of users, and the way conflicts influence research utilization as important issues for the explanation of research utilization.

It is argued that power is a better explanatory factor in organizational analysis than are 'goals' or 'rationality'. This is supported by examples from the author's research in social-work organizations. These examples illustrate some of the ways that power is organized in what recent writers have called 'loosely coupled', 'street-level' bureaucracies.Informal and spontaneous organizing practices as well as rituals decide real (as distinct from formal ) power and control at the operating level. For the analysis of those processes, a distinction is made between the means of organizing and other operational resources of an organization.

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I denna artikel diskuterar vi expertisbildning och professionalisering i frivilliga organisationer på det sociala området. Det finns två infallsvinklar i texten: dels vill vi se den allt större tonvikten på expertis och professionalitet som en följd av professionaliseringsdiskussionen i socialt arbete, dels undersöker vi hur denna utveckling förhåller sig till organisationernas demokratiska karaktär.