Social Theory in Nursing Scholarship, From Humanism to Post‐Humanism: Revisiting S. Nairn on the Structure–Agency Debate
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agency and structure are notable concepts in nursing philosophy and research. In this paper, we revisit two articles by Stuart Nairn which contrast selected theoretical perspectives exemplifying different positions within the structure-agency debate. Nairn's chief argument in 2009 was that nursing scholarship overemphasized the role of agency while neglecting the concept of social structure. The goal of Nairn's articles was to remedy this asymmetrical perspective. Building on his analyses of Lévi-Strauss, Parsons, Giddens, Archer, and Bourdieu, and the nursing examples he employed, we critique and extend Nairn's contributions by situating the structure-agency debate within the broader context of sociological theory. We suggest that his included theoretical perspectives largely assume agency to be an exclusively human attribute. Recent developments in critical posthumanism challenge this anthropocentric view, conceptualizing agency as distributed across human and nonhuman actors. Recognizing that differing approaches to structure and agency carry distinct implications for nursing knowledge and practice, we call for nurse scholars to make explicit their theoretical commitments when engaging these concepts in research and theorizing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".