Published in Nursing inquiry
For most of this century, extensive and heated discourse has surrounded defining, conceptualizing, and implementing nursing professionalism. These discussions, for the most part, have approached professionalism as a set of universal, unchanging, objectively-measured criteria. This study explores professionalism as an ideology; an image that a socia...
Published in Nursing inquiry
This paper examines the current use of the terms 'story', 'narrative' and 'voice' within health care. It argues that the focus on narrative forms is related to nursing's professional development of an alternative epistemology to science, and to nursing theorists' mistrust of 'Enlightenment' modes. However, in order for this project to be productive...
Published in Nursing inquiry
Published in Nursing inquiry
Published in Nursing inquiry
This empirical study of first year nursing students examines their perspectives on nursing as a career, family commitments and the influence of gender equity issues on their future life goals. This paper returns to and reflects on what the students have to say as they attempt to give meaning to their lives, goals and experiences. What emerges are a...
Published in Nursing inquiry
Nurses have long anguished over how best to assess performance in clinical practice. The 'competency' movement appears to have provided a solution to this problem. In this paper I undertake a 'radical hermeneutic' interrogation of the cultural text of clinical practice doubled with a poststructuralist interpretation of the literal text of the Austr...
Published in Nursing inquiry
Published in Nursing inquiry
For some time scholars have called for changes in nursing in order to address the subjugated position of nurses within health care. This paper argues that through an engagement with participatory action research, nurses open up a possibility to bring about transformative shifts in nursing culture. The motivation for nurses to engage with this resea...
Published in Nursing inquiry
Modernity as a concept or ideal, resulting from the age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution gave hope of a better future and new possibilities. To be modern means an 'enlightened' individual and society, welcoming change and development. In this paper, I will discuss Foucault's analysis (1973) of problematics in medicine in eighteenth centur...
Published in Nursing inquiry
