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Health Care's Forgotten Majority: Nurses and Their Frayed White Collars

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This book is situated within the sociology of work literature, and provides an interesting analysis on the factors that influenced middle class workers' choice of collective organization of the 1990's. Specifically, the author investigates why nurses might join trade unions or professional associations. She argues that their objective class position affects the development of their subjective ideologies, and their subsequent choice of collective organization. It gets interesting as the author looks at those workers in "contradictory class positions" -- which influences their contested ideology.

Well worth the read for those interested in understanding the relationship between class and ideology.

"...Goodman-Draper's Health Care's Forgotten Majority is a class analysis of nurses. The author locates nursing within larger historical transformations in the organization of work, namely the rise of the white collar workforce and professionalization. The central argument of the book is that nursing is a class stratified occupation and that, based on differentiated positions in production, nurses create distinct ideologies of professionalization and competing strategies of collective organization.

Goodman-Draper differentiates nurses' class position along dimensions of "economic", "political", and "ideological" control, resulting in a stratification into "high", "medium", and "low" positions. Nursing administrators rank highest in that they have the most control over the organization of production, have greater supervisory authority, and have greater control over the immediate work and its conceptualization. Mid-level administrators are in the most contradictory position, having some of the characteristics of higher management and some of the characteristics of staff nurses, who have the least amount of control on all three dimensions...

... The value of Goodman-Draper's book lies in its effort to examine systematically these internal divisions as well as the relationships among class position, professional ideologies, and collective means of empowerment."

"....Dr.Goodman-Draper's analysis of nurses' conditions of work in large bureaucratic organizations is extremely well done, with careful analysis and illumination of the situation, captured by the position of nursing within the labor force. Dr.Goodman Draper is to be commended on her excellent in depth analysis of nursing within Wright's framework. Her findings are significant for both nursing and in the broader context of heath care delivery systems."

Labor History Book Review; Fall 1996

A poorly-revised doctoral dissertation, this book advances
ideology but not knowledge.