According to the chapter, what was the time frame of the book's analysis and why was this period chosen?

The book analyzes the first two decades of postmodern, post-structural, and Foucauldian nursing scholarship, roughly from the late 1980s through the early 2010s. The author chose this period to convey the contrast between different streams in the literature, because it includes the 2005–2009 heyday of such scholarship, and because two observations from 2008 and 2012 pointed to important developments spanning the 1990s to the early 2010s.

The chapter sets the starting point in the late 1980s, when references to Foucault first appeared in nursing journals. The book then zooms in on what the author calls the first two decades of this scholarly literature. This period was chosen for three main reasons. First, examining these decades most effectively reveals the contrasts between different streams of postmodern, post-structural, and Foucauldian scholarship in nursing. Second, the author's bibliometric analysis indicates that 2005 to 2009 was the peak period for such work in key journals, with a noticeable shift in editorial priorities around 2010. Third, two specific observations motivated the timeframe: Sioban Nelson's 2008 call for nurse academics to move from quantity to quality in Foucault-related scholarship, and Afaf Meleis's 2012 dismissal of postmodernism and post-structuralism as not useful for nursing. Together these observations pointed to a need to explore events spanning the mid-1990s to the early 2010s.