AN INTERPRETIVE AND CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF PURPOSIVE RATIONALISM: IMPLICATIONS FOR LEGITIMATION AND COMMUNITY IN NURSING PREPARATION AND PRACTICE.
Contributors: University of San Francisco.
Published: 1992
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Philosophy.
Description: The influence of purposive rationalism and positivism on the current reality of nursing as a social system is investigated. The institutions in which nurses are educated and work promote and reinforce the development and application of problem-solving and decision-making skills in the rationalistic tradition. A high premium is placed on predictability, procedure and orderliness, and an air of neutrality is implied which serves to legitimize the process and its associated technology. Little effort is made to teach and support methods of interpreting information that recognize history, tradition and context, thus promoting a sense of collective identity. This ultimately creates a crisis in rationality which is associated with work-related stress, occupational burn-out, and high attrition rates.

Twenty-three nurses, all direct patient care providers with experience ranging from one to over twenty years, participated in exploring the failure of purposive rationalism as a justifying force for the interpretation of human action. Utilizing the participatory research process informed by the critical hermeneutic tradition, the primary methodology was group and individual dialogue.

The participants' narratives reflect the challenges nurses face in their daily attempts to interpret human behavior as symbolically structured in terms of cultural traditions and norms. The intersubjective interactions of the participants generated a heightened awareness of the unidimensionality of purposive rationalism and the limitations imposed by the system's allegiance to it. From this critical consciousness evolved the realization that nursing education in America must be modified to reflect Nightingale's wisdom: in direct service rests the profession's raison d'etre.

An alternative to the current nursing educational framework based on Habermas' domains of reality was thus developed. As a means of promoting reform within the framework of meaning that critical social theory and hermeneutics provides, the communicative action-oriented curriculum presented reflects language, tradition and praxis, thus resolving the preoccupation with episteme, closing the gap between theory and practice, and promoting a basis for a strong collective identity within the nursing profession.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-04, Section: B, page: 1786.

Thesis (ED.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF SAN FRANCISCO, 1992.

School code: 6019.