The ideal worker as real abstraction: labour conflict and subjectivity in nursing

The article interrogates the significance of the ideal nurse as an ideal worker in a context of labour conflict, using interview material from a study of an episode of conflict ending in the collective resignation of a group of nurses from a Swedish hospital ward. It puts forward the thesis that this ideal worker is best understood as an abstraction that achieves practical truth', that is, as a hypostasized practice or a real abstraction'. Hence, this management ideology exceeds strictly discursive dimensions. The analysis points to an enactment at the level of work practice prior to any explicit articulation of this ideology. Analysis attends to positioning on collective action, the identity work this positioning entailed and the truth' of nursing summoned therein, pointing to the ubiquity of the ideal worker in nursing along with its practical enactment.