Health care-organizations in Sweden are trying to replace the nursing profession in matters that the nurses are trained to do - which is care-related work – while it is only occasionally due to a lack of nurses. While this is happening, the care-related aspect of the profession is said to be the most appealing quality for people who wish to become nurses; “to make adifference for people in need”. This “pure” quality in a profession is hypothesized by Andrew Abbott (1981) to translate into high internal status within a profession. With this thesis, I aim to explore the relationship between professional status and “pure” work in the nurse-profession: How the “pure” work can be identified and how we can understand it in relation to the “impure” work, why nurses value some nurse specialists higher than others regarding status and how the dichotomy of “pure” and “impure” work affects this distribution of status within the profession. My chosen theory is based on Andrew Abbotts input to the debate of what constitutes professional status. He argues that if a profession does more professionally relevant work, it gets higher internal status (Abbott 1981). This theory is “only” based on historically strong, “classical” professions, to which I would like to contribute to by applying the theory to the nurse-profession. In order to do this, I have conducted seven semi-structured interviews and a form to evaluate how nurses’ rate eleven nurse-specialists according to status and how the themes of status are connected to the education and the work of the non-specialized nurse – the theoretically “pure” work. The non-specialized nurse is trained to have a full picture regarding patients, which includes both medical actions and basic caring needs. This is the nurses’ pure work. The nurses are not trained for the number of administrative tasks that the clinical reality demands, but it is a part of the full picture of the patient. Although it may appear as if it were impure work, calling this impure work is incorrect because of its’ pure qualities as a part of the full picture. The strongest consensus about attributed status is regarding the specialists with the highest and the lowest status. These attributions to status are based on the specific knowledge and the life-depending work of the specialists, which converge into each other as the same specialists has the same attributed status in both status-themes. This is opposite of what Abbott argues gives professional status because it is the low status-specialists that can be replaced by non- specialized nurses: Which practices, per definition, the pure work of the profession. In these areas of the low status specialist, the basic work of a non-specialized nurse suffices, which would also mean that the professionally purest work is done in these areas of work. This contradicts Abbotts argument that the purest work achieves the highest internal status.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-96816 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Svensson, Linus |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för samhällsstudier (SS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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