Emergence Of New Perspectives Research Articles

The Nurse Theorists: 21st-Century Updates—Jean Watson

This edited transcript of an interview with Jean Watson presents Watson’s recent thoughts about the current state of the discipline of nursing and the emergence of new perspectives; the contributions of her theory of human caring; and her other work on the advancement of the discipline of nursing, complementary and alternative therapies, nursing research, and nursing education.

Where Are We Now with Authorship and the Work?

I Why Ask At All? In the humanities and social sciences, knowledge is not accumulative and progressive as it is in the sciences. Paradigm shifts in scientific practice are rare, but thinking in the humanities is marked by the frequent emergence of new perspectives and vocabularies which reconfigure the existing landscape of thought, introducing topographies which first alienate and then annex, by redefinition, parts of the old one until the entire territory is covered, and swamps and backwaters that were overlooked under the old dispensation are brought into connection with the new mainstream. A previously untapped power of explanation is enjoyed; intellectual muscles are flexed. But it all happens with too great a rush: as the older concepts are rejected much that had been accounted for is pushed aside. Enduring habits of thought, pockets of resistance, which the latest intellectual movement has overlooked sooner or later return, in a self-reinvented form, to disturb the new, always multi-faceted, potentially conflict-ridden, never-quite-achieved consensus. Bibliography has recently become one of these revenants haunting the shifting sands of that field defined by the literary and cultural theory that has gradually saturated the thinking encouraged in postgraduate education in the anglophone world over the last twenty years. Theory in its various forms has come to seem to many students simply the established and accredited way of producing knowledge rather than as the force that liberated its teachers from an earlier, restrictive form of literary criticism. The rise of activity in editorial theory (which largely derives from practice) is a sign that literary theory has not, in fact, covered the field; and one could point to D. F. McKenzie's potentially fruitful marriage of bibliography and textual sociology, as well as the recent attempt to meld literary theory (especially new historicism and discursivity) with bibliography in the idea of the 'material Shakespeare'.[1] Concepts that have been left underexplained tend not to go away if they have work to do: so authorship as a form of explanation of complex literary phenomena has not died despite Foucault's distinction between the empirical individual who writes and the author-function, and his influential preference for discursive forms of explanation of which the author-function (and indeed individuality) can be seen as merely an effect. Even as they corrected Foucault's faulty chronologies, subsequent studies of the history of copyright and connoisseurship have revealed further the sense in which authorship may be said to be a social, juridical and more generally ideological formation.[2] The concepts of forgery and plagiarism have been, as a result, partially undermined in theory, but in practice they retain their moral bite. Author-based cataloguing systems still perform their positivistic task of uniquely identifying particular works, only now they are propelled by the remorseless efficiency of the computer. Habits of citation-by-author have been unaffected, author biographies have become a publishing growth area, and interviews with authors in the various media seem if anything to have increased in number. At least at the pragmatic level, there seems to be a continuing need for author-work differentiation despite a prevailing intellectual commitment to explanations based on discursivity and intertextuality. Despite the synchronic requirements of Saussurean structuralism which post-structuralism inherited, the finely tuned, because long-practised, diachronic methods of philology and bibliography have continued to realize their explanatory potentials in the post-structuralist period: in epigraphy, papyrology, semitic studies, biblical studies, folkloric studies, textual criticism of the early modern and modern periods, to name but a few areas. It is true that some of their organizing concepts, such as authorial intention or the search for origins represented, say, by the Urtext or the Shakespearean foul papers have come under sustained attack by literary theorists and practising editors alike. …

家族の個人化

The family has become a central issue of concern for policy makers in Japan due to demographic and socioeconomic changes. The resurgence of the family-crisis theme in the United States in the 1970s reflected the changing patterns of familial living as options among alternative life styles. The break-down of such assumptions as “the family as a group” and “two-parenthood”, and the increasing visibility of non-modal living styles over time has legitimated the emergence of new perspectives. Sex roles and gender research has accumulated a considerable amount of evidence to indicate that the wife's decreasing economic dependency on the husband, or woman's increasing autonomy, has shaken the modern family ideology. Life course studies and social network studies have shown the effectiveness of using the individual as the unit of analysis in studying the family. Through the review of the above research areas, this paper attempts to present a framework to explain a mechanism of family change, claiming that woman's independent access to economic resources brings the modern family system based on the “provider-housewife” role-pairing to an end. This process is the “individualization of the family” because the autonomy of each spouse is assumed. An application of such a framework is intended to interpret seemingly relevant scenes of contemporary Japanese families.

THE WILENSKI REVIEW

Since the early 1950s a spate of large‐scale inquests on government administration has swept the English‐speaking world, under governments of all political complexions. The phenomenon has received no general explanation, but its continuity has had certain practical advantages. It has added to the stock of techniques for conducting inquiries. It has suggested that linking investigation with implementation may reduce the risk of “pigeonholing”. It has revealed the importance of political support for essays in reform. The experience also invites, by now, some reflections upon the role of vested interests in the reform process, the impermanence and relativity of particular recipes for reform, and the constant emergence of new perspectives for appraisal of administration. Although Professor Wilenski's Interim Report* is well over a year old, his Review is still in full swing, and is worth discussing not only on its own merits but also for the way it illustrates some of these points.*Directions for Change: An Interim Report, by Professor Peter Wilenski, Commissioner, Review of N.S.W. Government Administration, Sydney, D. West, N.S.W. Government Printer, November 1977. Pp. ix + 353. Illustrations by Patrick Cook.