Beyond Caring
Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics
209 pages
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5-1/2 x 8-1/2
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© 1996
Vividly documenting the real world of the contemporary hospital, its nurses, and their moral and ethical crises, Dan Chambliss offers a sobering revelation of the forces shaping moral decisions in our hospitals.
Based on more than ten years' field research, Beyond Caring is filled with eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses turn the awesome into the routine. It shows how patients, many weak and helpless, too often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the health care system and how ethics decisions, once the dilemmas of troubled individuals, become the setting for political turf battles between occupational interest groups. The result is a compelling combination of realism and a powerful theoretical argument about moral life in large organizations.
Based on more than ten years' field research, Beyond Caring is filled with eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses turn the awesome into the routine. It shows how patients, many weak and helpless, too often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the health care system and how ethics decisions, once the dilemmas of troubled individuals, become the setting for political turf battles between occupational interest groups. The result is a compelling combination of realism and a powerful theoretical argument about moral life in large organizations.
American Sociological Association: ASA-Eliot Freidson Award
Won
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Nursing and Ethics in an Age of Organizations
1: The Routinization of Disaster
2: Protecting the Routine from Chaos
3: What It Means to Be a Nurse
4: How the Organization Creates Ethical Problems
5: The Patient as Object
6: Death as an Organizational Act
Conclusion
Appendix on Methods
Index
Introduction: Nursing and Ethics in an Age of Organizations
1: The Routinization of Disaster
2: Protecting the Routine from Chaos
3: What It Means to Be a Nurse
4: How the Organization Creates Ethical Problems
5: The Patient as Object
6: Death as an Organizational Act
Conclusion
Appendix on Methods
Index
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