The Knowledge Crisis of Nursing: A warping between ideological methodology, classical phenomenology and reflexive practice

In Norway and Denmark, the public healthcare is comprehensive, and nurses constitute a large and important part of the healthcare system. Nursing is at the same time a practical and a theoretical discipline. The academic development of knowledge in nursing is dominated by an interpretation of human science that uses health- or natural science methods. In this article, we engage in a theoretical examination of knowledge within the context of nursing academia in Denmark and Norway, pointing out structural similarities between the developments of knowledge, based on two prominent positions. The theoretical framework is built up from the tradition of praxeology and critical theory and used as the pervasive analytical lens to undertake a sociological analysis of knowledge. As a technique to the interpretation of the two positions, we perform a minor historization and an argument analysis of text samples from the agents. The results indicate that the dominating clinical nursing science in Denmark and Norway has been a success when it comes to capacity building at hospitals within an academic research tradition similar to the dominating tradition of the medical profession. However, this research primarily contributes with techniques and standard models, as it focuses on application-oriented research and is eager to produce suggestions in and for practice. This is important research, but insufficient when it comes to producing theories on and about nursing practice. We argue that this lopsided academic development causes a crisis in knowledge, because it fails to provide nursing with a proper theoretical scientific base. Such a base is prerequisite for nursing to develop as a subject in the academic university logic and is essential to enable professional reflexivity and social scientific knowledge on nursing care in order to meet the contemporary demands