Frames of Impact in Social Service Organisations

According to the results, interpretations of impact in the literature and in practice are both oriented towards the clients of social services. While psychological and social attributions of impact at the individual level dominate the literature across fields, professionals and leaders primarily emphasise psychological goals when describing the impact of their work. Economic impact is not considered a primary concern in any of the fields, and this is less prevalent among staff in the organisations studied than in the literature. Political impact as a target in the sense of "advocacy" or "policy practice" is only weakly developed across all fields. Further research could examine why political impact is regarded as relatively unimportant, despite the fact that the political mandate is an explicit part of social work's self-conception.

Additionally, clients (and their family members) can be identified as the primary recipients of impact orientation: when organisations discuss impact, they rarely focus on politics, public administration or wider society, but instead prioritise the users of their services as key stakeholders. 

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the project was conducted at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences between 2019 and 2022. It aimed to reconstruct and relate interpretive frameworks of impact in four selected fields of practice. This was achieved through a systematic literature review and field research conducted within Swiss social service organisations. The findings, based on a broad empirical foundation, show for the first time how the concept of impact is interpreted within these fields and in the social service sector more broadly.