Nursing is possible owing to a series of intricate systemic relations. Building on an established tradition of sociological research, we critically analysed the nursing profession in Chile, with an emphasis on its education system, in the light of social systems theory. The paper's aim was to explore basic characteristics of nursing education as a system, so as to outline its current evolution. Drawing on recent developments in nursing, we applied an empirical framework to identify and discuss functionally differentiated systems that (...) are relevant to nursing and observe communications between them. We found that the dynamics of nursing as a whole develop from communications with closely related systems, including the nursing profession and the education system more broadly. While the discipline (as a system of representations) strives to control the profession (as an applied occupational field), the necessities of practicing nurses imply other forces mediating the making of the profession, a process framed by market dynamics in education and health. (shrink)

Histories of nursing that disregard their linkage to broader historical movements often lead to historically detached versions of nursing identity that omit the perspective of their sources and the ideas of their time. Drawing on materials retrieved through a multilayered research strategy comprising internal and external sources, this article examines the development of a nursing identity in Chile during the period starting in the 1950s through the early 2000s. We analysed the sociopolitical contexts in which the nursing profession grew, the (...) changing direction of its role and how the nursing identity transformed itself. Through the use of historical sources and oral testimonies, we aim to give a nuanced account of how the history of public health and that of the country more broadly changed the object of identification of nurses, creating only relatively recently a sense of nursing community. Processes of identification, fragmentation and integration are highlighted, which challenge usual notions of history as a linear process. (shrink)