Nursing, Power, and Gender in Interprofessional Collaboration

This research explores how power and gender are used to construct professional hierarchies between nurses and physicians and therefore influence interprofessional collaboration. Through directed content analysis and constant comparison analysis, I analysed top-cited articles about interprofessional collaboration involving nurses and physicians and contextualized the relationship between gender and professional hierarchies with Witz’s occupational closure theory. In my first theme, The invisibility of gender, most authors considered gender incidentally or not at all. In my second theme, Interprofessional hierarchies in nursing work are reinforced by gendered strategies, nurses jockeyed for power by ‘playing the game’, a usurpationary strategy. Physicians used exclusionary and demarcationary strategies, as interprofessional collaboration represented a threat to their hegemonic control over health care. Despite the enduring presence of gendered strategies, gender gradually slid from analytic view. Gender is not recognized in most research as an avenue of potential hegemony that impinges on effective interprofessional collaboration.M.Sc