Real utopias at work: conflicts and dreams among nurses in the public sector

Abstract

This chapter illuminates what nurses experience as central conflicts shaping their everyday/everynight work, and what forms of injustice they identify as arising from those circumstances. Through the concept of real utopia, we explore what forms of radical visions of care nurses harbour and express. A central argument is that the interviewed nurses suggest a new system of value - in which care constitutes the moral centre of the healthcare organisation,and in which care is allowed to take time and caring time is valued as an asset, rather than viewed as an avoidable cost. We argue that to sustain social reproduction, a new notion of value must evolve in society, one that places primacy on care instead of on accumulation. In the nurses’ accounts, we see radical proposals of such a new system of value - one in which care is the prime resource and a prime profit. Such a vision moves beyond demands for new managerial models, and instead suggests a re-interpretation of how to measure output and what to conceptualise as productivity.