Evidence‐based practice (EBP) first appeared on the healthcare horizon just over a decade ago. In 2003 its presence has intensified and extended beyond its initial relation to medicine embracing as it does now, nursing and the allied health disciplines. In this paper, I contend that its appearance and subsequent growth and development are the effects of potent ‘regimes of truth’, four of which bear the names: positivism, empiricism, pragmatism and economic rationalism. My aim is to show how EBP generates the (...) controversy it does because its nature and methods are inextricably interwoven with the way it has become politicised and professionalised. This exegesis is an attempt to outline how the combined effects of the four forms of rationality mentioned above allow for both the methods and objectives of EBP to be constructed as they are, while at the same moment producing the particular effects of knowledge and power in terms of who sells and who buys the idea of EBP in the culture of contemporary healthcare. (shrink)

Courting competency: nursing and the politics of performance in practiceNurses have long anguished over how best to assess performance in clinical practice. The ‘competency’ movement appears to have provided a solution to this problem. In this paper I undertake a ‘radical hermeneutic’ interrogation of the cultural text of clinical practice doubled with a poststructuralist interpretation of the literal text of the Australian competency project. Through this work I attempt to expose some of the deeply embedded assumptions that underwrite the competency (...) movement and amplify the problems posed by an uncritical appropriation of competency based training and assessment in nursing education. (shrink)

This essay surveys and assesses J. G. Merquior's principal English?language contributions to liberal social and political theory. The greatest strength of Merquior's work is his recognition that one can neither understand nor defend liberalism without first understanding and defending modernity. The greatest weakness of Merquior's work is his overly oppositional conception of the relationship between modernity and its postmodern critics, particularly his failure to recognize that both the positive and negative features of postmodernism are simply radicalizations of the positive and (...) negative features of modernity itself. It is argued that the strengths of Merquior's work are best affirmed and its weaknesses best overcome by appropriating it within the context of a ?critical modernist? approach to understanding and legitimizing the institutions and practices characteristic of modernity and liberalism. (shrink)