Abstract
This study looks into the culture of nursing professionals in the present-day Czech health-care system at a time of personal, generational, and educational transitions (reforms), which have driven a change of organisational- cultural means in the relationship between two key professions: doctors and nurses. The article presents the results of a biographical study of nurses, paying detailed attention to their emotional labour in cooperation with doctors in accident and emergency ward settings.The article stresses the importance of emotion management as a substantial part of the gendered professional identities of health-care workers and discusses the situations when nurses' subordinate status requires a kind of stressful emotion management to keep the doctor-nurse professional relationship intact, which is not required from doctors.
The study draws on the concept of organisational culture in practice/action, on a Goffmanian and Garfinkelian ethnomethodology of scripts of interaction (rules, norms) in order to reconstruct the feeling rules that govern a nurse's emotional display and her role in cooperating with doctors.