Vividly documenting the real world of the contemporary hospital, its
nurses, and their moral and ethical crises, Dan Chambliss offers a
sobering revelation of the forces shaping moral decisions in our
hospitals.
Based on more than ten years' field research, Beyond Caring is filled
with eyewitness accounts and personal stories demonstrating how nurses
turn the awesome into the routine. It shows how patients, many weak and
helpless, too often become objects of the bureaucratic machinery of the
health care system and how ethics decisions, once the dilemmas of
troubled individuals, become the setting for political turf battles
between occupational interest groups. The result is a compelling
combination of realism and a powerful theoretical argument about moral
life in large organizations.