ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relevance for academic nursing of a number of distinctions emphasised in the theoretical literature and presents their implications for the status and trajectory of the discipline. It discusses nursing's entry to the academy in terms of the disturbance of boundaries between the sacred and profane. It also explores the relevance of Basil Bernstein's work on singulars and regions. The debate concerning nursing's 'double-edged dilemma of disciplinary development' generates heat and offers guidance for nurses' knowledge production, transmission, acquisition and translation practices. A social realist approach takes the idea of the voice of knowledge seriously and offers conceptual and analytic resources to illuminate what is at stake in nursing's struggles for legitimacy. Ironically, the way forward for nursing may lie in emulating the field with which it has such a problematic relationship and has expended great effort in differentiating itself, scientific medicine. Scientific nursing, not 'nursing science', offers a possible future for academic and professional nursing.
