Tim Scott is a senior lecturer in organization at the University of St. Andrews School of Management. His publications include articles on a range of topics, including improving communication with people with cancer and heart disease, organizational culture, health information technology, and ethnography. He has published books on health care performance and organizational culture, and on implementing new information technology in Kaiser Permanente. His current book, advocating a poststructural revision of organization studies, is forthcoming.Davies is a professor of health care policy and management at the University of St. Andrews School of Management. His research interests include public service delivery encompassing evidence-based policy and practice, performance measurement and management, accountability, governance and trust. He also has a particular interest in the role of organizational culture and organizational learning in the delivery of high quality services, and in developing greater understanding of the working relationships between service professionals and service managers. Diane Whalley is a research fellow in the National Primary Care Research and DevelopmentCentre at the University of Manchester. Her main areas of interest include the psychological aspects of recruitment and retention in the primary care workforce, and the design and psychometric evaluation of measurement tools in health care.

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Much of the discussion of research-informed practice in education has centred on two perspectives: the rational-linear and interactive perspectives on research use. This paper examines two initiatives aimed at delivering research-informed practice in schools that appear to represent these two perspectives, Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies and the School-Based Research Consortia Initiative. This examination reveals that both initiatives contain rational-linear and interactive elements. It also highlights other features of the initiatives not captured by the rational-linear and interactive perspectives. The paper argues that in order to capture the cross-cutting and multifaceted nature of initiatives on the ground, it is helpful to overlay the rational-linear and interactive perspectives with three models of research use developed in social care field: the research-based practitioner model, the embedded research model and the organisational excellence model. The resulting matrix provides a framework for considering whether, when and how these different approaches to increasing research use might be combined.

As philanthropic foundations take on increasingly prominent sociopolitical roles, the need for stronger conceptualizations of foundations as an organizational form is articulated widely across academic, policy, and practice contexts. Building on institutional research’s tradition of categorizing, classifying and typologizing organizational forms, our article critically explores the different ways in which foundations have been cast and differentiated in international academic and practice literatures. Examining and integrating these, we propose an integrative framework of foundation types. Incorporating 13 categories—three contextual, five organizational, and five strategic ones—the framework allows for clarifying distinctions and identifying commonalities between different foundation forms, offering a basis for developing more reflective and differentiated research and practice knowledge.