Nurses' ways of talking about their experiences of (in)justice in healthcare organizations: Locating the use of language as a means of analysis

Abstract

Nurses have their own ways of talking about their experiences of injustice in healthcare organizations. The aim of this article is to describe how nurses talk about their work‐life experiences and discuss the discursive effects that arise from nurses' use of language regarding their political agency. To this end, we present the findings garnered from a study focused on exploring how nurses deploy their political agency to project their idea of social and political justice in public healthcare organizations and how they face the challenges and uncertainties of (re)thinking their institutional order when it does not resonate with their professional ethos. We then discuss the implications that nurses' use of language has in relation to their ability to deploy their political agency to oppose the forms of injustice they face in their daily practice. We conclude by stating that careful attention should be placed on understanding the discursive implications of nurses' use of language on their individual and collective emancipation in healthcare organizations.

Board talk: How members of executive hospital boards influence the positioning of nursing in crisis through talk

“…However, this is too limited as organizational interaction is more complex than just organizational hierarchy. In other words, agents have certain role expectations (Anglin et al, 2022) of themselves and others and this is materialized in influence and talk (Lopez‐Deflory et al, 2023b). Kee et al (2021) highlight that an excessive focus on hierarchy can diminish the value of expertise, adversely affecting organizational performance.…”

“…In this paper, we, therefore, zoom in on how members of executive hospital boards (hereafter: board member(s)) and nurses use talk as a relational dance of positions in times of crisis. Although the importance of talk has been acknowledged for frontline nursing work (Barcelona et al, 2023;Dahlke & Hunter, 2020;Lopez-Deflory et al, 2023b;Marey-Sarwan et al, 2022) it seems overlooked in the nursing leadership and governance literature (see Cummings et al, 2021;Kanninen et al, 2021). However, Verhoeven et al (2023) showed that such a discursive leadership perspective can be supportive for comprehending the relational processes and interdependencies between board members and nurses.…”