Towards a Sociology of Nursing offers fresh insights from recent research into the nursing profession. Nurses represent an important part of the professionally trained female workforce and, being a middle-class profession, changes in nursing reflect changes of many working women worldwide. Scholarship addressing these changes, however, often consists of narratives of nurses talking about themselves, which can be enriched by a sociological background that foregrounds hypotheses.​

In this book, Ricardo A. Ayala problematises the realities which inform, affect and shape nursing, offering new perspectives on the consequences of those social realities for the nursing profession and society more broadly. He draws on extensive field research with nurses in the workplace, spending time with them, interviewing key actors and reading and analysing documents critically through a distinctive sociological lens.