Quantum Caring Leadership: Integrating Quantum Leadership With Caring Science

https://doi.org/10.1177/0894318418774893
Nursing Science Quarterly, Vol. 31(3) 253 –258
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DOI: 10.1177/0894318418774893
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Article
Transcending Dichotomies—Unitary
Thinking
Unitary nursing has been evolving with theories in nursing scholarship over many decades to clarify and articulate its disciplinary foundation. Contemporary nursing discourse challenges nurses to engage in disciplinary-specific knowledge development through extant nursing theories and unifying philosophical worldviews. Prominent nursing leaders raise questions about the survival of nursing without a shared ontological, philosophical, and ethical disciplinary worldview (Barrett, 2017; Grace, Willis, Roy, & Jones, 2016; Newman, 2003; Newman, Sime, & Corcoran-Perry, 1991; Phillips, 2017). Without clarity of the disciplinary foundation of theory, knowledge, and practice, the nursing profession can easily lose its way. The profession will otherwise continue to be guided by pressures from institutional cultures to adhere to pressures of distancing and objectifying humans and health, conforming to control dynamics, and the dominant conventional medical-clinical paradigm.
Nursing’s longstanding focus on the whole person and environment, in relation to universal human-environment health, has been acknowledged as unitary (Cowling, 1999; Newman,
2003; Newman et al., 1991; Rogers, 1970; Watson & Smith,
2002). The continuing disciplinary discourse of paradigms evolved from Rogers (1970) original science of unitary human beings to current theories and scholarship making a case for unitary thinking as the highest level of consciousness, congruent with nursing phenomena (Cowling, Smith, & Watson, 2008; Newman, 2003; Newman et al., 1991; Phillips, Likewise, nurse scholars have acknowledged that caring is the fourth metaparadigm concept, replacing the concept of nursing (Conway, 1985; Cowling et al., 2008; Watson & Smith, 2002). Nursing is the study of human-environment, health and healing through caring—or caring in the human health experience (Newman et al., 1991; Smith, 1992). These definitions reflect the disciplinary focus on wholeness, along