Towards a Sociology of Nursing

Towards a Sociology of Nursing offers fresh insights from recent research into the nursing profession. Nurses represent an important part of the professionally trained female workforce and, being a middle-class profession, changes in nursing reflect changes of many working women worldwide. Scholarship addressing these changes, however, often consists of narratives of nurses talking about themselves, which can be enriched by a sociological background that foregrounds hypotheses.
In this book, Ricardo A. Ayala problematises the realities which inform, affect and shape nursing, offering new perspectives on the consequences of those social realities for the nursing profession and society more broadly. He draws on extensive field research with nurses in the workplace, spending time with them, interviewing key actors and reading and analysing documents critically through a distinctive sociological lens.

Uniquely draws on social theory, rather than the more usual forms of critical reflection on the evolving state of professional nursing globally, to examine various aspects of the gendered and socially organized nursing workforce within a sociological framework Fills a gap by examining nursing from sociological theories, models and concepts, written in accessible language and illustrated with clinical examples Draws on extensive field research observing nurses in the workplace Provides an essential resource for professionals working in health services, labour unions, and professional organisations, and faculty nurses and advanced students alike

Autorentext

Ricardo A. Ayala works at the Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Belgium.

Klappentext

Towards a Sociology of Nursing offers fresh insights from recent research into the nursing profession. Nurses represent an important part of the professionally trained female workforce and, being a middle-class profession, changes in nursing reflect changes of many working women worldwide. Scholarship addressing these changes, however, often consists of narratives of nurses talking about themselves, which can be enriched by a sociological background that foregrounds hypotheses. In this book, Ricardo A. Ayala problematises the realities which inform, affect and shape nursing, offering new perspectives on the consequences of those social realities for the nursing profession and society more broadly. He draws on extensive field research with nurses in the workplace, spending time with them, interviewing key actors and reading and analysing documents critically through a distinctive sociological lens.

Inhalt
Part I.- Chapter 1: Overview of the Study.- Chapter 2: Nursing as a profession: old tensions, new insights.- Chapter 3: Nursing the status: the construction of work and social class identity.- Chapter 4: Redoing gender in nursing.- Chapter 5: Red and blue: competing for jurisdiction, losing in power.- Part II.- Chapter 6: The time has come: changing patterns of power.- Chapter 7: The organisation, the background, the landscape: navigating the reforms.- Chapter 8: Nurses in the new landscape of interprofessional relations.- Chapter 9: A note on methodology.