Virtual power: gendering the nurse-technology relationship

To date, studies of the relationship between technology and its consumers have used the constructs of traditional paradigms of production and consumption as the foundation for analysis. These studies have served to reinforce traditional concepts of gender and hierarchy in the nursing-technology dichotomy. To propose a new and more relevant framework for analysing the technology-nursing relationship, the analysis of gender within the methodology of the social history of technology will be used. Healthcare will be viewed as a technologic network, and within that network multiple knowledge domains reside and interact. These domains, in turn, are socially constructed and historically contingent. This paper operationalizes this argument by examining the domain of the early nurse practitioner movement of the 1960s as part of a gendered technologic system. The findings of this study illuminate the agency of nurses in the shaping of traditionally male knowledge domains and as a crucial factor for understanding the evolution of not only the particularities of the nurse-technology relationship, but also the generalities of the gendered ways of knowing within the healthcare-technology relationship. Perhaps most importantly, different sets of questions can be formulated to analyse the history of the nurse practitioner movement from a technologic perspective that will provide new standpoints for the nursing-technology dichotomy in the millennium.