Designing Formal Classification Systems to Better Articulate Knowledge, Skills, and Meanings in Nursing Practice

I have been engaged in making the hidden work of nursing visible through articulation research. From the beginning, through my mentor Bert Dreyfus, I understood the articulation of knowledge embedded in nursing practice as a counter to oversimplified reductions typically used in the formal classification schemes used to communicate, coordinate, and legitimize nursing practice and knowledge to healthcare institutions, the public, accountants, physicians, and other nurses. In many ways, a formal classification of the work involved in nursing mirrors nursing’s relationship to medicine. Medicine, in the wake of Descartes’ followers, has separated the social from the medical, though there is an attempt in this era of an aging population, increased chronic illnesses, and dependence on technology, to reintegrate the social and the medical. Through the recent movement of evidence-based medicine, both medicine and nursing have increasingly understood science and technology as their primary legitimizing forces. The objective is chosen over...