In this article, we reconstruct a Dutch case in which policymakers, experts, and professional organizations proposed to amend a law so as to differentiate between different kinds of nurses and the work they do. In doing so, they specifically sought to support and reposition higher educated nurses. The amendment was met with fierce opposition from within the nursing community, however, and was eventually withdrawn. Drawing on interviews with key actors in the debate and an analysis of policy documents and social media platforms, we reconstruct what happened and how. Our reconstruction is informed by institutional theory, the sociology of professions, and a body of literature that examines populism in its increasingly diverse modes of existence. By combining these bodies of literature, we have sought to expand on an analytical repertoire aimed at capturing the dynamics between individual professionals and their institutional environments. Our approach specifically allowed us to foreground a populist action frame through which opposition was organized and to discuss the destructive and generative potential it has had for future aspirations in the professionalization and (re)organization of nursing work.
This article draws on ethnographic research to conceptualise how nurses mobilise assemblages of caring to organise and deliver COVID care; particularly so by reorganising organisational infrastructures and practices of safe and good care. Based on participatory observations, interviews and nurse diaries, all collected during the early phase of the pandemic, the research shows how the organising work of nurses unfolds at different health-care layers: in the daily care for patients and their families, in the coordination of care in and between hospitals, and at the level of the health-care system. These findings contrast with the dominant pandemic-image of nurses as 'heroes at the bedside', which fosters the classic and microlevel view of nursing and leaves the broader contribution of nurses to the pandemic unaddressed. Theoretically, the study adds to the literature on translational mobilisation and assemblage theory by focussing on the layered and often invisible organising work of nurses in health care.
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