ABSTRACT
Since its formal beginnings with Nightingale’s work, nursing has struggled to achieve the respect and recognition offered to other professions in the health sciences, especially medicine. In seeking this affirmation, nursing in general, and agencies and organizations overseeing nursing practice and education in particular have mimicked medicine with respect to requiring adherence to competencies, standards, domains, essentials, and other guidelines that supposedly establish an occupation as a credible profession. The creation of these mandated guidelines has fostered a situation in which professional nurses and schools of nursing expend an enormous amount of time and energy demonstrating that either themselves or their students are “competent” to practice. Nursing education organizations’ obsession with the “professional project” raises the question of whether such a project creates an authoritative discourse about what constitutes the professional nurse. As identities are shaped and reshaped through social processes and interactions, the relationships among competencies, professional nursing organizations, and the identity of the nurse as a professional are considered in this chapter.
