Nursing Inquiry

Nelson, Sioban

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00036.xpmid: N/A

Hazelton, Mike

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00040.xpmid: 10696208

This article reports the findings of a series of ethnographic research interviews conducted with psychiatric personnel in one region of Tasmania between 1995 and 1997. These interviews formed part of a more wide‐ranging project examining changes in the regulatory practices of psychiatric personnel in the light of the professional, media and policy discourses that inform them, especially in relation to the impact of social justice reforms spelt out in recent Australian mental health policy. In discussing the nature of psychiatric work the personnel interviewed returned repeatedly to the themes of safety and risk management. The study presents an analysis of discourses deployed around these themes and argues that concerns over safety and risk are central to the emergence of a new institutionalism in acute in‐patient psychiatric services.

Gastaldo, Denise; Holmes, Dave

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00042.xpmid: 10696209

While a commitment to the development of nursing theory has been a significant force in nursing scholarship, particularly in the US, the authors have noted a recent trend among nurses in different countries to develop Foucauldian interpretations of nursing. The objective of this paper is to identify those publications by nurses that employ a Foucauldian perspective and to provide a useful summative review of these works to date, which illustrate the potential contribution of a Foucauldian reading of nursing. The authors have reviewed 27 publications written by nurses which present a Foucauldian analysis. These publications were issued between 1987 and 1998 in English, Portuguese and German. The most frequent concepts treated in the literature reviewed are power/knowledge, surveillance, discourse, discipline, resistance, docile bodies, clinical gaze, and panopticon. The literature reviewed illustrates that Foucault’s concepts can have a profound impact on the way we conceive of nursing as a discipline and as a profession. Nursing care becomes a political event, nursing knowledge contributes to the dissemination of regimes of truth, and nurses, rather than being powerless, are perceived as professionals who exercise power over life in society. A Foucauldian reading of nursing enables nurses to move into a broader interdisciplinary and critical scholarship.

Johns, Christopher

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00038.xpmid: 10696210

Reflective practice, as an ideal model, is generally espoused as a developmental process to empower practitioners to achieve and sustain effective practice. Yet when reflective practice is accommodated into the real world of everyday practice can this ideal itself be realised? Or will reflective practice be accommodated within existing norms whereby it becomes another technology of surveillance? The paper draws on dialogue taken from a guided reflection session to consider whether reflection can be empowering and to consider those factors which limit this potential.

Lagerwey, Mary D.

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00037.xpmid: 10696211

Using historical discourse analysis, this study provides a thematic analysis of writings of nursing and birth control as found in The Birth Control Review from 1917 to 1927. The author contrasts this publication with the official journal of the American Nurses Association, the American Journal of Nursing from the same years to explore nursing voices and silences in early birth control stories. In dialogue with social contexts, nursing endeavors and inactivity have played important yet conflicting roles in the birth control movement in the United States. Nursing writings from the early twentieth century reflect eugenic beliefs, national fears of immigrants, and ambivalence about women’s roles in society and the home. Nurses simultaneously empowered women to choose when to become pregnant and reinforced nativist and paternalistic views of the poor.

Penney, Wendy; Warelow, Philip J.

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00017.xpmid: 10696212

Understanding the prattle of praxis This paper will examine and discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of conceiving nursing as a form of praxis, encompassing within this, the idea that in order to conceive nursing as a form of praxis, reflection has to be considered a key component. It will be argued that praxis can (and should) become a practical process and that, when applied to one’s own nursing practice, changes, reshapes and allows one to discover new meanings (or, draws out the meanings which were always there). Clearly there are many different forms, understandings and applications of the term praxis and this paper will examine some of the tensions and the nexus that exist. These claims will be supported by using personal–professional journal extracts as a catalyst, showing that there is potential for closing the theory–practice gap through more in‐depth reflection, and that this examination using reflective techniques will demonstrate that nurses, by using this process develop their own implicit personal nursing theories. Using one’s colleagues as a critical resource allows what might be described as ongoing reflection to occur, where critical friends in both theoretical and practice worlds act as a dialectical catalyst for growth and change, moving toward closing the theory–practice gap.

Feldman, Susan

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.1999.00041.xpmid: 10696213

This paper foregrounds some of the central themes that a group of older women in writing workshops identified as integral to their health and overall quality of life. In particular it looks at how these women felt about their relationship to professional health care providers, and the role that both play in the maintenance of the women’s health and well‐being. The research that it is based on comes from narratives and autobiographical stories written by these women, which aimed both to identify the issues and concerns that affect them as older women, and to position them centrally as agents and collaborators in intellectual work. Their challenging words disrupted conventional story lines about the experiences of growing older, and confronted the narrow range of negative images of ageing and the accompanying stereotypes that currently pervade our culture.