Context and contingency in the history of post World War II nursing scholarship in the United States.
OBJECTIVE
To examine the context for the development of nursing scholarship post World War II.


METHODS
Historiographical analysis of the social, political, and cultural context of nursing scholarship in the postwar period, with an understanding of how this context shaped nursing scholarship.


RESULTS
The development of nursing scholarship was influenced by three contextual strands: Nurses' use of experiential clinical knowledge to situate practice questions in the changing clinical care milieu of the 1950s to the 1970s; The development of an intellectual genealogy through new educational opportunities at the baccalaureate and graduate level from the 1960s to the 1980s that provided the foundation for reintegrating practice and education; and the creation of a growing cadre of nurse scholars and their political influence on the relationship between power, knowledge, and clinical practice. These formulations are critical for understanding how scholarship changed over time and help us understand contemporary clinical practice, its authority structure, how it helps us define a body of knowledge from which practice proceeds, and then, how it responds to public demands.


CONCLUSIONS
Nursing scholarship is nested in a particular social, political, economic, and cultural context. This context also determines how and why it is generated, debated, and used. Its production does not always follow a rational, logical pattern. Nursing knowledge development is influenced as much by the political underpinnings of health care as it is by social, economic, cultural, and scientific foundations.
Fairman
Julie
J
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. fairman@nursing.upenn.edu
D015400:Clinical Nursing Research / Q000266:history*; D004508:Education, Nursing, Baccalaureate / Q000266:history*; D004511:Education, Nursing, Graduate / Q000266:history*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D014481:United States