Pedestals and Micro-Politics: Heroizing Nurses from Nightingale to COVID-19

• In Event: Reproducing Inequality at Work: Social Psychological Mechanisms (Co-Sponsored by Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section)

Abstract

Heroization is an underexamined cultural and social psychological process in the work and occupations literature. This paper examines heroization in the nursing profession, starting with the foundational role of Florence Nightingale and into the contemporary construction of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. This historical and contemporary process provides vital context for understanding the emotional norms that shape nursing and with them, the broader cultural schemas that can reproduce exploitative workplace conditions. Heroization in this case constructs the ideal nurse as selfless, compassionate, and a strict manager of negative emotions, including anger, even in the face of risk and injustice. Explored as part of an ongoing project, the nurse hero ideal as well as nurses’ defiance against it, have implications for explaining the increasing levels of labor activism that have occurred in the healthcare field since the start of the pandemic.

Author

• Marci D. Cottingham, Kenyon College