S.TRUEMAN PhD THESIS 2016
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study. The researcher adopted a translation model which investigates and describes the links in a network and records that at each point there is local agency: When you simply have power—in potential—nothing happens and you are powerless; when you exert power—in actu—others are performing the action and not you … Power is not something you may possess and hoard... Power is, on the contrary, what has to be explained by the action of the others who obey the dictator. (Latour, 1986, p. 265) At this stage the researcher embraced a Foucauldian analysis of what power is not. It is not an individual, a group of institutions (groups within the healthcare arena or actor arena) and/or mechanisms (policies and procedures and/or systems in delivering mental health patient) which ensures the subservience of the population of a given state (remote nurses delivering mental health patient, or any other group). It is not a general system of domination exerted by one group over another (within the remote nurse’s social world, or healthcare arena, e.g., psychiatrists, medical practitioners). The researcher’s analysis, from the outset, assumed an overall unity of domination (within the remote nurse’s social world). The location of power was not conditional and ‘should not be sought in the primary existence of a single point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 93); ‘Power is; it should be understood . . . as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization’ (1984, p. 92). Instead of, or central points of sovereignty, power is ‘the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable’ (p. 93). Power is omnipresent and constantly swirling around within the remote
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