Hi All,

I have what I think is a good/interesting/moot topic...

i was, as usual, wobbling around the web and decided to go back to the
ideas we tossed around earlier about social work and nursing.

I found a neat article - sort of a classic 'critical' social work
practice article. My contention would be that we could change specific
references to 'social work' with specific references to 'nursing' and
with little or no effort the article could, with some judicious
editing and nursing literature references rather than social work
literature references, be turned into an acceptable article describing
nursing practice. I'd add that they even have a Fawcett - though none
can compare with our own.

This doesn't mean that you would not be able to find problems with the
article when converted to a nursing venue - but that the similarities
to a 'critical' nursing practice would be far more profound than
differences, especially when compared to other nursing or social work
theories. By this I mean the articles, as crafted for social work and
nursing would be far more like each other than any article that might
be crafted that would describe heating, ventilation, and air
conditioning (HVAC) practice, i.e. a non-'human science' discipline.

I'd argue further that if two 'theories' T1 and T2 that purport to
describe different phenomena can be demonstrated to be
indistinguishable, or perhaps isomorphically compatible, then it may
be that aside from linguistic conventions, the phenomena being
described are not really distinguishable except in ways that may not
correspond to significant structural features. That is, if we assume
that in T1 0, 1 as binary numbers, conform to the following rules:

0 + 0 = 0
0 + 1 = 1
1 + 0 = 1
1 + 1 = 0

and also that in T2 with elements: a, b conform to the following rules

a + a = a
a + b = b
b + a = b
b + b = a

and we come to realize that occurrences of '0'/'1' in T1 are always
associated with occurrences of 'a'/'b' in T2, we know what is
happening in both systems even though we might think in terms of
nursing in one and social work in the other...

Again, this is not at all to say that differences cannot be
highlighted, much as skeptics might nitpickingly attack our work or we
theirs, but rather, that as human science disciplines, social work and
nursing have strong ties from which valuable cross-fertilization might
occur. Note, I am not suggesting a causal link between the two systems
- but rather that each system has been developed independently to
describe the same, or nearly identical phenomena in the world and that
only our ability to abstract, qua theoreticians, from those
superficial differences allows us to see what practitioners of T1 and
T2 may not see.

I'd be interested to see what other people think about that or just
some thoughts on the article...

Posited another way - would a 'critical theory' guided nursing
educator who was unfamiliar with social work literature consider a
slightly revised version of this paper to be plagiarism or a
potentially valuable contribution to a critical theory of nursing?
Would it make any difference to you if it were revised by a person at
the ADN/BSN/MS/PhD level? i.e. is it so off the money that it would be
assumed to have arisen in an alien context or would it be close enough
to merit a pass on an assignment.

Here's the link

http://www.criticalsocialwork.com/01_1_reinventing_healy.html

bear