| Represented in this account are four phases of research into nurse/patient/technology relationships: (1) locating technology in the discourse of nursing and describing controversies that surface in traditional research, (2) illustrating common explanations of nursing that act to stabilize or normalize conditions within which nurses come to know the influences of technology, (3) describing an alternative, innovative theory of technology advanced by Latour (1991), and (4) explicating everyday nursing practice as socio-technical relations. This thesis argues that technology is taken for granted as a neutral tool in everyday nursing practice, and that authors commonly treat only the human actors as ‘agents’ in constituting the nurse/patient/technology relationship. A traditional philosophical analysis undertaken in the first half of this thesis makes it explicit that nursing's scholarly grounding concerning nurse/patient/technology relationships is in question. Therefore, the purpose of the research that follows is to explore alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between practice and technology.; The research traces one question: ‘how is competent practice possible, if human/technological relations fix opportunities for exercising discretion in nursing?’ (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
