Conceptualising and Reimagining Professionalism in Different Contexts: From Nurse to Nursing Lecturer

This article aims to conceptualise and reimagine the notion of nursing professionalism in two different contexts. Utilising a critical reflexive approach whilst drawing on salient theories, concepts, and studies on professionalism, I will consider my professional journey from that of a mental health nurse within the NHS to that of a nursing lecturer within a research-intensive university. The paper highlights that, at its worst, the gendered lens of what I term, old professionalism, may alienate some professions, nursing in this case, over others. It may also create stigmatising attitudes towards those who choose professions that do not fit with gendered norms. At its best, ideas around professionalism can provide helpful ways to conceptualise and make sense of professional nursing work as seen in more democratic, interdependent, collaborative and degendered notions of what I term new professionalism, and connective professionalism. The paper also argues that education-focused nursing lecturers may feel fragmented due to competing tensions and in lacking credibility in undertaking research. Two responses to these predicaments are offered. The first can be characterised by expanding and reimagining the professional self as a connective professional who reconciles and navigates multiple identities and discourses within the period and context in which they work. The second calls for education-focused lecturers to engage in discursive creation by creating new knowledge, networks, and opportunities and to deploy these in the service of others. Binary or dualistic divisions appear throughout this paper in different guises and help to elucidate some of the problems associated with nursing professionalism and professional work. In particular, the ineluctable hegemony of cultural codes of masculinity are discussed in their function to make some nurses feel unprofessional, prevent autonomous working through the demands of neoliberal managerialism, and favouring positivist knowledge over interpretive approaches to knowledge creation.