The tremendous growth in nursing literature about spirituality has garnered proportionately little critique. Part of the reason may be that the broad generalizing claims typical of this literature have not been sufficiently explicated so that their particular implications for a practice discipline could be evaluated. Further, conceptualizations that attempt to encompass all possible views are difficult to challenge outside of a particular location. However, once one assumes a particular location in relation to spirituality, then the question becomes how one resolves (...) the tension between what are essentially theological or philosophical commitments and professional commitments. In this study, we discuss the tension between these perspectives using the idea of a responsible nursing response to spiritual pluralism. We then problematize three claims about spirituality in nursing discourse based upon our location as scholars influenced by Christian theological understandings: (i) the claim that all individuals are spiritual; (ii) the claim that human spirituality can be assessed and evaluated; and (iii) the claim that spirituality is a proper domain of nursing’s concern and intervention. We conclude by suggesting that the widely shared values of social justice, compassion and human dignity may well serve as a grounding for the critique of spiritual discourses in nursing across particularized positions. (shrink)

ability to understand the ongoing dynamic of the research process. This contrasts with the research team, which often spends little ...

Modern American nursing has an extensive ethical heritage literature that extends from the 1870s to 1965 when the American Nurses Association issued a policy paper that called for moving nursing education out of hospital diploma programs and into colleges and universities. One consequence of this move was the dispersion of nursing libraries and the loss of nursing ethics textbooks, as they were largely not brought over into the college libraries. In addition to approximately 100 nursing ethics textbooks, the nursing ethics (...) heritage literature also includes hundreds of journal articles that are often made less accessible in modern databases that concentrate on the past 20 or 30 years. A second consequence of nursing’s movement into colleges and universities is that ethics was no longer taught by nursing faculty, but becomes separated and placed as a discrete ethics course in departments of philosophy or theology. These courses were medically identified and rarely incorporated authentic nursing content. This shift in nursing education occurs contemporaneously with the rise of the field of bioethics. Bioethics is rapidly embraced by nursing, and as it develops within nursing, it fails to incorporate the rich ethical heritage, history, and literature of nursing prior to the development of the field of bioethics. This creates a radical disjunction in nursing’s ethics; a failure to more adequately explore the moral identity of nursing; the development of an ethics with a lack of fit with nursing’s ethical history, literature, and theory; a neglect of nursing’s ideal of service; a diminution of the scope and richness of nursing ethics as social ethics; and a loss of nursing ethical heritage of social justice activism and education. We must reclaim nursing’s rich and capacious ethics heritage literature; the history of nursing ethics matters profoundly. (shrink)

This important text draws on decades of research, arguing that modern nursing germinated and grew an ethics from its own native soil, that is a rich, fulsome and philosophically informed; grounded in the tradition, and practice of nursing. This systematic and comprehensive book is an essential contribution for students and scholars of nursing ethics.

Modern American nursing arose during the Civil War and subsequently adopted the Nightingale educational model in the 1870s. By 1889, the journal Trained Nurse and Hospital Review had been established. It published a six‐part series on ethics in nursing. With the establishment of the American Nurses Association in 1893, the articles of incorporation gave the organization its first charge: “to establish and maintain a code of ethics.” While the rich and enduring tradition of nursing's ethics has been concerned about individual (...) patients and their relational nexus, nursing ethics has from the beginning been a social ethics, intimately concerned both for the shape of society and for social change. This concern has been for health, conceived broadly and not focused specifically on disease and its treatment, but including the social causes of disease. Nightingale herself was an ardent social reformer, instituting a wide range of types of army sanitation reform, sanitation reform in India, and hospital and nursing reform. Despite her gender, her wealth and privilege granted her access to men in power who furthered her policy and reform agenda. From the start, then, modern nursing was imbued with a social reformist bias. (shrink)

The large body of literature labeled “ethics in nursing education” is entirely devoted to curricular matters of ethics education in nursing schools, that is, to what ought to be the ethics content that is taught and what theory or issues ought to be included in all nursing curricula. Where the nursing literature actually focuses on particular ethical issues, it addresses only single topics. Absent from the literature, however, is any systematic analysis and explication of ethical issues or dilemmas that occur (...) within the context of nursing education. The objective of this article is to identify the spectrum of ethical issues in nursing education to the end of prompting a systematic and thorough study of such issues, and to lay the groundwork for research by identifying and provisionally typologizing the ethical issues that occur within the context of academic nursing. (shrink)

This article calls nursing to engage in the study of religions and identifies six considerations that arise in religious studies and the ways in which religious faith is expressed. It argues that whole-person care cannot be realized, neither can there be a complete understanding of bioethics theory and decision making, without a rigorous understanding of religious-ethical systems. Because religious traditions differ in their cosmology, ontology, epistemology, aesthetic, and ethical methods, and because religious subtraditions interact with specific cultures, each religion and (...) subtradition has something distinctive to offer to ethical discourse. A brief example is drawn from Native American religions, specifically their view of `speech' and `words'. Although the example is particular to an American context, it is intended to demonstrate a more general principle that an understanding of religion per se can yield new insights for bioethics. (shrink)

Sister (Sr.) Marie Simone Roach, of the Sisters of St. Martha of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, died at the Motherhouse on 2 July 2016 at the age of 93, leaving behind a rich legacy of theoretical and practical work in the areas of care, caring and nursing ethics. She was a humble soul whose deep and scholarly thinking thrust her onto the global nursing stage where she will forever be tied to a central concept in nursing, caring, through her Six Cs (...) of Caring model. In Canada, she was the lead architect of the Canadian Nurses Association's first code of ethics, and her influence on revisions to it is still profound more than 35 years later. In this paper, four global scholars in nursing and ethics are invited to reflect on Sr. Simone's contribution to nursing and health‐care, and we link her work to nursing and health‐care going forward. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the key ethical questions of performing gene editing research on military service members. The recent technological advance in gene editing capabilities provided by CRISPR/Cas9 and their path towards first-in-human trials has reinvigorated the debate on human enhancement for non-medical purposes. Human performance optimization has long been a priority of military research in order to close the gap between the advancement of warfare and the limitations of human actors. In spite of this focus on temporary (...) performance improvement, biomedical enhancement is an extension of these endeavours and the ethical issues of such research should be considered. In this paper, we explore possible applications of CRISPR to military human gene editing research and how it could be specifically applied towards protection of service members against biological or chemical weapons. We analyse three normative areas including risk–benefit analysis, informed consent, and inequality of access as it relates to CRISPR applications for military research to help inform and provide considerations for military institutional review boards and policymakers. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a growing societal concern that often spills over into the workplace. However, employers are not recognizing the spillover of domestic violence as a workplace issue. This is problematic considering the serious financial, legal, and ethical consequences for organizations. We analyzed six cases involving domestic violence that were litigated under specific legal bases: Violence Against Women Act, discrimination laws including Title VII, Family and Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security Disability, Occupational Safety and Health Act, (...) and associated state and municipal ordinances. We chose cases that illustrate the problems of companies meeting the legal standards but not necessarily reaching ethical expectations. Our approach is congruent with the perspective that both legal and ethical analyses should be used in organizational decision making. We suggest for future research the analysis of additional litigated cases, other ethical perspectives, and additional sources of data. In addition, we suggest that companies who are striving for corporate social responsibility should integrate the ethical treatment of domestic violence victims. (shrink)

Much has changed in maternal-fetal medicine since the early 2000s, when the previous ethical frameworks for fetal therapy trials were established. We applaud Hendriks and colleagues for taking on t...

An oversize volume celebrates the National Ranching Heritage Center, a museum and historical park located on the northern edge of the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, established to preserve the history of ranching, pioneer life, and the development of the livestock industry in North America.

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, (...) the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies. (shrink)

Discharge planning for vulnerable infants and children is a collaborative, inter-disciplinary, decision-making activity that is grounded in the ethical complexities of clinical practice. Although it is a psychosocial intervention that frequently causes moral distress for professionals and has the potential to inflict harm on children and their families, the process has received little attention from ethicists. An ongoing study of the transition of technology-dependent children from hospital to home suggests that the ethical issues embedded in the discharge-planning process may be (...) concealed by dominant cultural values, institutional policies, clinical standards, historical precedents, and legal regulations. (shrink)

Drawing on constructionist theory, this study examines how the media portrayed five public reporting events initiated by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), considering whether the coverage encourages or discourages companies from undertaking a reporting initiative as part of their ethical management. Media coverage was limited but generally favorable across all five events. Coverage frequently included claims made by FLA spokespersons and provided basic facts about the organization and its activities. Extensive detail about labor violations found by monitors was often included. (...) Additional media coverage centered around themes of public reporting and transparency, an assessment of the FLA’s work, brand accountability and responsibility of corporations with regard to working conditions and labor standards, and specifics about the factory monitoring and partnering with factories and NGOs that is necessary to achieve change. Counter-claims brought question to the FLA’s efforts. Explanations about why the social condition exists were fairly limited, and thus, provided little insight into how the problems might be resolved. We discuss managerial implications regarding public reporting initiatives and media coverage, particularly regarding the countering effects of positive coverage and diminishing news stories. (shrink)

Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)

The contributors explore the life, thought, and works of Aelred, 12th-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx Abbey, his sermons, spirituality, and histories and highlight their principal themes.

The work draws together a rich tapestry of material across many different disciplines, covering the crucial relationship between medicine and law from the early apothecaries to the modern-day general practitioner. It presents an invaluable overview of the subject and offers vital background reading to anyone interested in medico-legal medicine, as well as providing a springboard for students of medicine and law interested in researching the field through its remarkable diversity of reference resources.

The ArgumentThis article uses the history of early sound recording technology in the united States between 1878 and 1915 to show how published discourse contributed to the way the talking machine was defined and situated as a commercially viable product. Comparing the published accounts of Edison's phonograph and Berliners gramophone in popular scientific articles between 1878 and 1896 illustrates that technological advances in sound recording technology take on important cultural meanings. Critical to these meanings is the way in which the (...) technological “fidelity” is linguistically transformed into an aesthetic quality, projected and interpreted within demonstrable values of musical culture. Beginning in 1902, the Victor Talking Machine Company, formed to market the gramophone, took advantage of these cultural meanings to claim a technological advantage over Edison's cylinder recorder. Whose voice was recorded became part of the claim to technological superiority. The Victor Company succeeded in capitalizing “Culture” by promoting their recordings of opera stars like Enrico Caruso as technologically and culturally faithful to live musical performance and as a democratically available access to a privileged lifestyle. Thus did the Victor Company use a terrier and a tenor to legitimate their talking machine as an American musical instrument. (shrink)

We discuss the view that a hole is identical to the region of spacetime at which it is located. This view is more parsimonious than the view that holes are sui generis entities located at those regions surrounded by their hosts and it is more plausible than the view that there are no holes. We defend the spacetime view from several objections.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS It is my lot, if not my duty, in presenting these opening remarks at our conference, to take the title of our meeting seriously. ...

This study explores the relationship between board environmental committees and corporate environmental performance. We propose that board environmental committees will be positively associated with CEP. Moreover, we argue that the composition of the committee as well as the presence of a sustainability manager will influence this relationship. Our results find support for a positive association between board environmental committees and CEP. Further, the presence of a senior-level environmental manager positively moderates this relationship, but is not effective in isolation. Unexpectedly, no (...) support was found for the influences of stakeholder representation. (shrink)

At least 177 scales are available to researchers who want to measure religiosity, but questions exist as to exactly what these scales are measuring and in whom they are measuring it. A review of these scales found a lack items designed to measure ethical action in society or the world as a prophetic response to the experience of the divine. Instead, the vast majority of scales focus on internal experiences and beliefs or institutional relationships. A review of scale norm groups (...) found that norm groups often are not fully described, particularly in the area of race/ethnicity, and when they are described, they reveal an over-reliance on convenience samples of college students and an under-representation of racial/ethnic minority groups. Examples of scales with more fully described and more representative norm groups are given, and recommendations are offered for researchers using and developing religiosity scales. (shrink)

Several standard conditions of adequacy for confirmation are considered and a conclusion of B. Skyrms regarding the converse-consequence condition is shown to be mistaken. Widely accepted conditions such as the entailment condition and the special consequence condition are shown to be open to counterexample, and confusion about these conditions is traced to confusion about the difference between two kinds of confirmation concepts--concepts of firmness and concepts of increase in firmness. The importance of concepts of the latter sort is stressed. Finally, (...) some suggestions are offered relating to the notion of selective confirmation. (shrink)

The paper makes a strong plea for the health care system itself to strive for better health. It argues that a growing weakness of the health care system is high level psychological stress. This, in turn, is caused by the overuse of memory-linked analytical process thinking in managing the affairs of health care organizations. The author strongly recommends a shift towards a greater use of natural flow thinking which is more supple, spontaneous, creative and stress free. She argues for this (...) shift on the basis of several years of personal engagement with and learning of flow thinking practices in different parts of the world, including India. (shrink)

Constructing Race on the Borders of Europe investigates the visual imagery (in painting, photography, prints, film, and design) of race construction primarily in Scandinavia and the empires of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and Russia at a time when the disciplines of ethnography and anthropology were expanding and publications on race were debating competing theories of biological, geographic, linguistic, and cultural determinants. These regions, while on the periphery of continental Europe, largely marginalized in the scholarship of nineteenth-century art history, and ignored by Edward (...) Said (Orientalism 1978), have been central locations for theorizing white identity and for containing diverse ethnic populations that have generated substantive ethnographic study and regional conflicts since the eighteenth century. This anthology explores art that engaged with ethnography and anthropology to shape visual representations of subordinate ethnic populations and material cultures, both indigenous (Roma, Sámi, Inuit, and Celts) and migrant or colonial (Muslims and Blacks), chiefly between 1850 and 1930, but extending into the early twenty-first century. The essays in this book contribute to postcolonial research by documenting colonial-style treatment of minority groups and by seeking to qualify binary systems through explorations of anomalies, complexities, and contradictions that emerge when seen from the perspective of the fine and applied arts. This book presents a range of different artistic voices that responded to ethnographic and anthropological information by producing images or objects that adopted, altered, or critiqued that information. The authors seek to uncover instances of connections and variability, to establish the fabricated nature of ethnic identity, and to challenge the certainties of racial categorization. (shrink)