ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the professional status of nurses is challenged in several ways. Nurses experience a double-edged sword, of intensifying regimes of accountability at work alongside inchoate opportunities for wealth creation beyond the remit of the formal sector. A special branch of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed the unjust monopolization of the profession’s institutions by a white minority, and the decades of unfair treatment suffered by black nurses as a result. Media focus on the inadequacies of health-care provision had intensified the anxiety that nurses felt around the subject. The videotape is an apt metaphor for the gaze feared by nurses, and for the skewed character of current audit practices, which have the appearance of being controlled secretly and at a distance. The intensely stratified character of the hospital setting, and of the nursing profession itself, means that the social position and experiences of nurses are extremely heterogeneous.
