Highlights The links between transparency and sustainabilityare poorly understood. We present a typology of information for supply chain governance. The coverage of existing transparencyinitiatives is limited and biased in scope. We present ten ways in which transparency can improve sustainability governance.

No abstract

Nursing prioritization of the patient need for care: A tacit knowledge embedded in the clinical decision-making literatureEvery day in clinical settings, nurses practise in complex and dynamic situations. Nurses work to achieve emergent order in these situations through nursing prioritization of the patient need for care. As direct research on nursing prioritization had not been reported, a study, using critical realism as method, was designed to discern the profession's embedded understanding from within the clinical decision-making literature. The research synthesizes a tacit knowledge on nursing prioritization of the patient need for care from key international literature (from 1966 to 2003). Nursing prioritization was discerned in both education and practice literatures; interrelationships between these and theoretical approaches were also identified. Nursing prioritization of the patient need for care was revealed both as a non-sequential decision-making process throughout unfolding patient situations and as an advanced skill of nursing practice. Increasing confidence with this skill is the hallmark of developing expertise.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to consider how meaning may be made of nursing practices by contrasting the rationalistic approach commonly used in the nursing literature with Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Design/methodology/approach – The data under consideration is an account of ten to 15 minutes of a larger ethnographic study of nursing practices which asks the question: how do nurses accomplish nursing within and between patients’ needs for care in the acute hospital setting? The five main sources of data were: observations of and conversations with nurse participants, as well as hospital documentation (including facility protocols and patients’ notes) and the observer’s field diary. These were woven together to provide an account of one nurse with one patient for a few moments of her day. Findings – Although this paper makes no attempt to speak to the rest of her workload, in these few minutes the nurse accomplishes multiple moments of nursing practice. Further, while the rationalistic approach presents the nurse as a highly skilled practitioner, Bourdieu’s theory of practice not only illuminates the nurse’s role as pivotal in the acute hospital setting but is also able to address the dialectical nature of the relationship between nurses’ practices and the dynamics of the context. Originality/value – The use of Bourdieu’s theory of practice makes possible the study of how nurses nurse “within and between” to illuminate the everyday practices of nurses.

Seeking to answer the question of what it is that nurses do, scholars researching nursing have worked with theoretical approaches ranging from the more abstract to the concrete: from philosophizing the nature of nursing to emphasizing the interpersonal nature of nursing practice to exploring processes of clinical decision‐making. In this paper, we engage with Bourdieu's theory of practice as an alternative approach that helps to understand the finer points of nurses' everyday practices of nursing as being grounded in an ontology of practice. We first outline the foundations of Bourdieu's thinking as he established both a relational philosophy of science and an embodied philosophy of action to develop the theory of practice around notions of habitus, capital and field. Then, using the inter‐relationships of these key elements of the theory of practice as a ‘toolkit to think with’, we explore an instance of nursing in practice in an acute care setting and show how, in taking account of social context, the dialectics between the elements reveal the social interactions that are accomplished in the doing. Moving to the relationships of these three elements with Bourdieu's further notions of illusio, symbolic power and symbolic violence, we uncover an ontology of nursing practices in the everyday. We conclude by summarising what this ontology of practice has to offer investigations into practices of nursing in any social context.