AIM: To identify the proclaimed bases of Irish nursing academics' identities as academics and to interrogate the ways in which they legitimate nursing as an academic discipline. BACKGROUND: Six years after pre-registration nursing education in Ireland transferred to the higher education sector, tensions continue to exist concerning the status and legitimacy of the discipline and those who claim to profess it. METHOD: The languages of legitimation of senior nursing academics were elicited in the deliberately argumentative conversational context characteristic of many discourse analytic studies. These languages were analysed in terms of four of the building tasks of language: knowledge, politics, relationships and identities. FINDINGS: Irish nursing academics are unable to credibly and convincingly resist representations of their discipline as lacking legitimacy in academia. Indeed, they themselves construct academic nursing as a fragmented field, prone to colonisation and subversion by a plethora of other discourses, including medical, management and industrial relations discourses. CONCLUSIONS: Senior nursing academics in Ireland need to urgently consider how nursing in the academy can reconfigure its relationships with clinical nursing, increase its intellectual autonomy, enhance its internal coherence and cohesiveness, strengthen the epistemic power of its knowledge base and critically evaluate the ways in which past practices inform its present, and whether and to what extent they should shape its future.
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