Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics

Documenting the real world of the contemporary hospital, its nurses, and their moral and ethical crises, this work analyzes the forces that shape moral decisions in hospitals. Based on more than ten years of field research, "Beyond Caring" contains eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses turn the unusual into the routine. It shows how patients - many weak and helpless - often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the health-care system and how ethics decisions have become the setting for political turf battles between occupational interest groups. The result is a combination of realism and a theoretical argument about moral life in large organizations.