Abstract:
Nursing originates from societal beliefs about women‟s roles of self-sacrifice and
obedience situated within a history of patriarchal control. Unfortunately, these ideologies
continue to influence and shape nurses‟ work in hospitals. Within the literature, several
dominant discourses construct hospitals and nurses‟ work in hospitals as chaotic and
challenging while nurses are conceptualized as stressed and fatigued. Overcrowding,
increasing patient acuity, budget constraint, and chronic understaffing are only some of
the issues nurses face in their every day and night work. Because of these problems,
nurses are expected to care for patients in the hallways; manage with minimal staffing;
and simply absorb the work associated with acutely ill patients. Nurses actively
participate and take up these discourses as their work. Patriarchal assumptions and
nurses‟ endless compromise and accommodation have resulted in the normalization of
hospital problems as just part of nurses‟ work. Prevailing ideologies and institutional
discourses make invisible, and taken-for-granted, how this work contributes to sustaining
the hospital‟s power. External relations contribute to influencing and organizing nurses
and their work. Using institutional ethnography and a poststructuralist perspective; this
research relies on my experience, historical research, participant observation and
interviews to reveal how institutional discourses have framed nurses‟ work in hospitals
and how nurses actively participate in perpetuating and vivifying them.
Description:
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, University of Regina, vi, 235l.
