Overview

This edition is offered as a comprehensive reference for the theoretical heritage of contemporary nursing. Its intended audience comprises graduate students enrolled in master's and doctoral programmes, scholars and researchers engaged with the discipline's intellectual development, advanced practitioners whose clinical work is informed by theoretical reflection, educators responsible for the formation of new generations of nurses, and the broader community of healthcare professionals whose interest in nursing's distinctive contribution warrants the kind of systematic treatment that the edition attempts to supply. The work is not principally intended for introductory undergraduate audiences, although suitably motivated baccalaureate students may find particular sections accessible and illuminating. The edition's organisation reflects deliberate choices that warrant brief explanation. The first chapter establishes the foundational vocabulary-metaparadigm concepts, levels of theoretical abstraction, patterns of knowing-within which the substantive chapters that follow are situated. Chapters two and three address the historical foundations: the nursing philosophies that constituted the discipline's earliest theoretical work and the interpersonal theories that emerged from the mid-twentieth-century engagement with psychiatric and psychotherapeutic traditions. Chapters four through six survey the grand theories that dominated theoretical work in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s: the self-care framework of Dorothea Orem, the several systems-theoretical frameworks that draw on general system theory and its variants, and the simultaneity paradigm that constitutes nursing's most metaphysically ambitious theoretical tradition. Chapter seven examines the caring theories that have, across the past four decades, articulated what many practitioners and scholars take to be the discipline's substantive moral centre. Chapters eight and nine address the middle-range theories that constitute the most actively expanding sector of contemporary theoretical work. Chapter eight examines middle-range theories addressing phenomena clustering around symptoms, suffering, and the experience of illness; chapter nine examines middle-range theories addressing health promotion, life transitions, and the trajectories of chronic illness self-management. Chapter ten surveys the situation-specific theories that articulate the most concrete level of theoretical work in nursing, addressing particular populations or practice contexts with the cultural and contextual specificity that the diversity of contemporary global practice demands. Chapter eleven examines the borrowed theories that the discipline has imported from adjacent fields and adapted to its distinctive concerns. Chapters twelve, thirteen, and fourteen address application, illustration, and critique respectively. Chapter twelve examines the four principal domains within which theoretical frameworks are applied: clinical practice, education, administration, and research. Chapter thirteen presents fifteen extended case studies through which the practical productivity of theoretically grounded nursing reasoning is illustrated across diverse clinical situations. Chapter fourteen examines the critical perspectives that have shaped contemporary reassessment of the theoretical tradition and the future directions toward which the discipline's theoretical work is moving.

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