Despite noteworthy exceptions, nursing’s literature largely disregards the ways in which social and sociological theory permeates, guides and shapes research, education, and practice. Likewise, social theory’s ability to position nursing within wider structures of healthcare and educational provision is similarly and puzzlingly downplayed. The questions nurses ask and the problems they face cannot however, adequately be addressed without engaging with social and sociological theory and, to progress this engagement, contributors to this book explore how social theories are used by and might apply to nursing and nursing practice.The book draws on a wide range of perspectives û philosophical, theoretical, empirical and political û to offer a robust and wide-ranging critique and analysis. Social Theory and Nursing is essential reading for nursing researchers, academics and educators, as well as scholars and researchers in medical sociology, medicine and allied health.

Accounting for knowledgeable practice / Mary Ellen Purkis and Christine Ceci -- C. Wright Mills and the sociological imagination / Gary Rolfe -- Nursing theory, social theory, and philosophy of science / Robyn Bluhm -- On cow-tapulting and raised drawbridges : an argument for strategic integration of social theory into nursing / Barbara Pesut -- Social and sociological theory : reimagining nursing's disciplinary identity / Martin Lipscomb -- Critical realism : a social theory for evidence-based nursing / Sam Porter -- Using theory in qualitative research : a realist perspective / Joseph Maxwell -- The purpose and scope of sociological theory : implications for nursing / Stuart Nairn -- Foucault, social theory, and nursing research : a critique / Kirsten Frederiksen and Kirsten Beedholm -- Contemporary political debates, social theory, and nursing practice in mental healthcare / Dawn Freshwater -- Feminism and nursing : an un/easy alliance of silences and absences / Kay Aranda -- It's all in the genre : sociological speculation and theorizing in the nursing literature / Derek Sellman -- Lies, damned lies, and stories : nursing, narrative, numbers / John Paley.