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Desiring productivity: nary a wasted moment, never a missed step!
Author(s) -
Rudge Trudy
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
nursing philosophy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.367
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1466-769X
pISSN - 1466-7681
DOI - 10.1111/nup.12019
Subject(s) - pleasure , productivity , modalities , set (abstract data type) , power (physics) , health care , sociology , materialism , process (computing) , psychology , aesthetics , epistemology , political science , computer science , social science , economics , law , psychotherapist , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , macroeconomics , programming language , operating system
The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses are enrolled into and take part in programmes of efficiency and effectiveness. Using the philosophical theorizing about desire as a force or power, I focus specifically on what is understood as relations between desire and productivity in current W esternized health‐care systems. Use is made of the idea from S pinoza that human emotions consist only of pleasure, pain, and desire as these act as a motive force. This is then linked with more contemporary work on the politics and discourses of desire. A report on the implementation of a productivity programme in the U nited K ingdom, T he P roductive W ard: Releasing time to care™, is explored for the ways its developers set about motivating nurses to endorse and enact the programme. In exploring the mechanics of desire in these processes, a view of desire as productive is promoted. Looking at desire as assembling actions, and an assemblage, moves the analysis to an interrogation of actions and practices used to enable and bring nurses to the process. Moreover, in working through the various modalities and operations of desire, the potential and limits of such projects are abstracted. Such potentials and limits are necessarily set by the intensification of power and desire in the capitalist economy, saturating areas of nursing, and health‐care provision.