A THEORETICAL CONSIDERATION OF ALIENATED LABOR WITH APPLICATION TO NURSING HOSPITAL PRACTICE AND NURSING EDUCATION.
Contributors: Boston University.
Published: 1984
Number of pages: 195
Subjects: Health Sciences, Nursing.; Education, Philosophy of.
Description: This theoretical study offers an interpretive, structural paradigm of labor and its alienation which rests on a specific humanistic, Marxian notion of the human being as an active creator of self and reality. The purpose the paradigm serves is that of a critical framework, an instrument for investigating nursing labor and the objective structural conditions of nursing hospital practice and education which constrain and modify labor. The utilization of the Marxian paradigm as a standard of labor holds promise for interpreting nursing reality and generating new ways of looking at existing nursing problems, particularly the profession's lack of occupational self-determination. This problem is viewed as a fundamental lack of ownership and control of the labor process and is seen as a metaphor for alienation.

Alienation is presented as an elliptical term that requires completion in two directions. First, it is defined from inside the structure of the labor process. Second, it is defined in relation to the outside structuring of the labor process.

Labor is seen as an essential and distinctive human mode of productive activity that stems from a need for self-realization. The two ontological moments of objectivation and objectification are identified and analyzed as constituents of the labor process. The notion of the alienative moment is developed as an externally coerced separation within the objectificative moment. The structural correlates of this separation are examined within the education and hospital nursing environments.

Attention is given to the structures or stable configurations within the hospital system, such as the hierarchal structure, and within the educational system, such as marketplace orientation; wherein the mode of alienated labor is dissolved and deducible.

The study effectively provides a new perspective and model of nursing labor, generates new concepts, raises new issues (class structure, false consciousness, proletarianization) and poses new questions (who owns nursing labor?, and why?, what should the purpose of nursing education be?).
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 47-05, Section: B, page: 1931.

Thesis (ED.D.)--BOSTON UNIVERSITY, 1984.

School code: 0017.