Ordering a Profession: Swedish Nurses Encounter New Public Management Reforms

This article deals with professional responses to and handling of New Public Management reforms in the context of Swedish health care. The focus is on Swedish nurses, and the argument is that the extent to which a profession is heterogeneous and embraces a variety of ordering processes explains differing, and even contradictory, responses within a single profession. The paper shows that the ordering processes within the Swedish nursing profession provided a wide variety of conditions for nurses’ encounter with the reforms. Overall, the transformations brought about by the New Public Management reforms aligned more easily with the process of ordering nurses into administrative leaders than with the process of ordering nurses into experts in caring.