Identidade profissional da enfermeira: possibilidades investigativas a partir da sociologia das profissões

Abstract

After more than 100 years of Nursing professionalization, nurses’ professional identity remains marked by maternal care, medical knowledge’ supremacy, training focused on technique and disease and low social visibility with regard to their specific work: the individual and collective care. The present study consists in a literature review that aimed to identify investigative possibilities on nurse professional identity in the theoretical field of Sociology of Professions. The professions became the object of study of sociology in the 1930s, with its epistemological foundations associated with the pursuit of understanding the concept of profession, the transformation of occupations in professions, professions’ social function and the implications of its development. The following sequence of explanatory paradigms of professional phenomenon can be identified: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, professional power theses and systematic and comparative approach. The perspectives of the Sociology of Professions allows to critically analyze the prevailing conceptions about Nursing and its role in society, the State’s participation in forging the “identity to another”, which created models and stereotypes for nurses’ professional profile, shaping the professional habitus, gender issues, power (especially in the doctor-nurse relationship and the profession internal segmentation), associative movement of the early twentieth century and, more currently, the political struggles waged along political and legislative bodies to Brazil. Such issues are fertile ground for analysis from the Sociology of Professions, favoring the deconstruction and reconstruction of nurses’ professional identity of as well as the assumption of a more proactive position by occupational group, towards building its own identity.