Of bedpans and ivory towers Nurse academics’ identities and the sacred and profane: A Bernsteinian analysis and discussion paper

Aim In light of debates arising from recent developments in Irish nursing education, this paper analyses tensions in the positioning of nursing in academia in terms of notions of the sacred and profane, and the symbolic boundaries between them, and discusses the implications of this analysis for nurse academics’ identities. Background The entry of nursing education to the higher education sector has occurred against a discursive backcloth of opposition which constructs nursing work as either sacred, and under threat from the academy, or profane, and unworthy of a place in it. Method Conceptual resources derived from the work of Basil Bernstein are deployed to analyse the forces driving the loom weaving this discursive backcloth. These forces are conceptualised as deriving from deep-seated fears and anxieties sparked by changes in the strength of symbolically important boundaries between constructions of the sacred and profane in the fields of nursing and higher education. These constructions are explicated. Findings Bernstein regards secure academic identities as inhering in strong boundaries between disciplines and between the fields of education and work. The transfer of nursing education from health to the higher education sector and nurse academics’ attempts to articulate a nursing-discipline specific knowledge base can be understood in these terms. This analysis challenges nurse academics who promote disciplinary eclecticism and those who legitimate academic nursing principally in terms of the acquisition of generic and transferable lifelong learning skills. Conclusions To counter a discourse that constructs them as a profane presence in higher education, some nurse academics have articulated a discourse of legitimation that constructs (academic) nursing as a sacred endeavour. Whether this can provide the grounds of their legitimacy and the basis of their careers as distinctively nursing academics is unclear at this stage of nursingʹs development as an academic discipline.