S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016

286

the construction of institutions functions as a way to align the network and make it increasingly irreversible’ (Hanseth & Monteiro, 1998). All groups within the remote nurse’s social world will not revert to first generation psychotropic medications, Morse code and the horse and buggy. Ipso facto current structures designed by administrators, facilitators and others, aided by other groups within the remote nurse’s social world, have embraced and embedded this irreversibility in a plethora of measures and techniques in delivering mental healthcare. Advancing technologies through time creates positions of there being no going back for remote nurses. Medications, mental health knowledge, transportability and communications are wedded irreversibly in the present delivery of mental healthcare. This conceptual process of irreversibility ensures stability of the networks in the social world and the coordination of actions. Stability is derived by the uniformity of actions, and agreed norms produced by technologies and artefacts. No network actor or group in the social world is advocating or unilaterally performing lobotomies to patient’s frontal lobes. Technological advancement and knowledges have produced agreed norms of action; lobotomies are not an option. Hence actions are coordinated, as no one is performing them. No actor or group can revert back to performing them, because that practice is not medically or socially justified. 8.2.12 Stabilisation in delivering mental health patient An actor-network prospers through stabilisation because none of the constitutive entities exist without the network in its current form. It is in the interest of all actors within a particular network (a network for the delivery of mental healthcare) to stabilise the network which guarantees their own survival to a higher or lower extent. Hence, the