Main description:

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.

Contents:

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.