Abstract
We present the discursive/narrative re-construction of hospital nurses’ “management of emotions” as a part of the social construction of their profession and professional identity. Our interest in professional culture focuses on the tools used in organizing and making sense of nurses’ actions in emergency situations, and especially on implicit rules and norms of behavior.
We approach profession-al norms ethnomethodologically, as members’ organizational knowledge (ethnomethods), as structures of the organizational culture “in practice”. The norms and rules regulating nurses’ behavior were generated from nine autobiographical research interviews in which nurses with long-term professional experience were asked about their careers.
Rules and norms contradictory to those applied in everyday social interactions (for example, “the nurse as a doctor’s lightning rod”) were strongly acknowledged by the nurses even though some of them were not sure if their application in hospital practice was just or fair.