What Lies Beneath? The Underlying Principles Structuring the Field of Academic Nursing in Ireland

This article reports the findings of a structural analysis of the field of academic nursing in Ireland and considers the implications of the field's current structure for its present status and future trajectory in the academy. Six years after preregistration nursing education transferred to the higher education sector, tensions continue to exist concerning the status and legitimacy of academic nursing and of those who profess to profess it. The languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics and national nursing leaders (n = 16) were elicited and subjected to a critical discourse analysis. Respondents' languages were analyzed in terms of the settings of four underlying structuring legitimation principles: autonomy, density, specialization, and temporality. Academic nursing in Ireland was found to be structured by low autonomy, high density, and weak specialization. I conclude that academic and professional leaders in Irish nursing need to urgently consider how academic nursing can reconfigure its relationships with clinical nursing, increase its intellectual autonomy, enhance its internal coherence and cohesiveness, strengthen the epistemic power of its knowledge base, and critically evaluate the ways in which past practices inform its present and whether and to what extent they should shape its future.