Educated Caring: The Emergence of Professional Identity Among Nurses

This article examines the formation of occupational identity in a nursing program. The normative and ideological dimensions of this process are revealed in the program’s goals and the views of educators and students through qualitative data from observations and 30 in-depth interviews. Educators seek to socialize students toward professionalism to raise the occupation’s status by emphasizing the scientific and technical basis of nursing. Yet students uphold a gendered discourse by identifying a normative dimension of caring as central to their occupational identity. The dilemma between professionalism and caring is reconciled as students construct an occupational identity based on “educated caring,” where these two dimensions are equally valuable and significant.

Ester Carolina Apesoa-VaranoEmail:

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Ester Carolina Apesoa-Varano   is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her areas of interest include work, occupations, and professions, medical sociology, gender, and inequality. She is currently working on her dissertation, entitled “Medicine and Caring: Healthcare Providers at Work.” Her previous research focused on a historical analysis of ideologies in the official publication of a large nursing organization. In 2004, a version of her qualifying paper “A Professional Project: Science, Caring, and Ideology in a Baccalaureate Nursing Program” was awarded the Graduate Student Paper Award from the Carework Network (an American Sociological Association affiliate organization). In 2004 she also co-authored with Charles Varano an article entitled “Nurses and Labor Activism in the United States: The Role of Class, Gender, and Ideology,” published in a special issue of Social Justice.