Ontological congruence, discipline and academic identity in university schools of nursing

Nursing is an old vocation but is relatively new to the academy, with schools of nursing being established in Western universities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their establishment was presaged by earlier moves of the preparation of pre-registration nurses from apprenticeships served in hospitals to tertiary education institutions (mainly community colleges and polytechnics) during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Preparation for a life in the professions has been a feature of universities since their inception. Nevertheless, changing a university’s offerings is contested, and new disciplines and the new academics within them often struggle to establish their legitimacy within the academy. This paper challenges contemporary accounts of nursing as a discipline the weak disciplinary boundaries of which undermine its place in the academy and hamper nurse academics’ development of an academic identity. Drawing on data from interviews with nursing academics, the paper discusses the ways in which the participants are, by their own actions, devising, amending and reinforcing the structures, code, rules and conceptual frameworks of the Nursing discipline. It also considers how, as they do so, these academics achieve a level of ontological congruence that is only possible as their internal biography, the nature of their day-to-day work and the expectations of their employer are able to ‘rub along’ together without creating the conditions for (self) destructive resistance or the exercise of coercive institutional power.