THE INFLUENCE OF THE PARADIGMATIC SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT ON NURSE ADMINISTRATION
According to the American Nurses Association (2004), the primary goal of the Nurse Administrator is to incorporate advanced knowledge and theories as part of a general effort to support nurses. The Nurse Administrator helps institutions develop standards for professional performance, evaluates the quality and effectiveness of nursing practice and nursing services, and works to foster a professional environment promoting understanding and effective use of organization, management, and nursing theories and research.
The American Nurses Association (2004) also states that the role includes the promotion of research and the integration of scientific knowledge into the delivery of nursing care. Clearly part of being able to attain the overall goal and properly fulfill subsidiary objectives relevant to this goal is to have a strong understanding of nursing as a science and how philosophical thought about science may affect this role. The purpose of this paper is to examine how one particular line of philosophical thought, namely the paradigmatic model of Thomas Kuhn, has influenced the field. The discussion will include an assessment of how Kuhn's model has affected my chosen role option as a Nurse Administrator.
The common picture of science is that it proceeds in linear fashion with the development of theory followed by a process of data gathering, the rejection or refinement of the theory, more data gathering, and so forth; in this manner, knowledge about a given phenomenon is slowly built up and developed over a period of years. However, this picture was shattered by Thomas Kuhn (1962) who stated that science does not happen in this manner. Rather, it proceeds by way of revolutionary upheavals separated by periods of relatively pedestrian research which are governed by what Kuhn refers to as paradigms.
For Kuhn (1962), a paradigm w...