Social Theory in Nursing Scholarship, From Humanism to Post‐Humanism: Revisiting S. Nairn on the Structure–Agency Debate

Agency and structure are notable concepts in nursing philosophy and research. In this paper, we revisit two articles by Stuart Nairn which contrast selected theoretical perspectives exemplifying different positions within the structure-agency debate. Nairn's chief argument in 2009 was that nursing scholarship overemphasized the role of agency while neglecting the concept of social structure. The goal of Nairn's articles was to remedy this asymmetrical perspective. Building on his analyses of Lévi-Strauss, Parsons, Giddens, Archer, and Bourdieu, and the nursing examples he employed, we critique and extend Nairn's contributions by situating the structure-agency debate within the broader context of sociological theory. We suggest that his included theoretical perspectives largely assume agency to be an exclusively human attribute. Recent developments in critical posthumanism challenge this anthropocentric view, conceptualizing agency as distributed across human and nonhuman actors. Recognizing that differing approaches to structure and agency carry distinct implications for nursing knowledge and practice, we call for nurse scholars to make explicit their theoretical commitments when engaging these concepts in research and theorizing.