The binding role of knowledge: an analysis of nursing students’ knowledge ties

Abstract

The paper discusses the challenges individualisation and de‐traditionalisation represent for professional learning and commitment. We point to the fact that integration via human bonds, face‐to‐face interaction and stable communities has become increasingly less effective in modern society, and to the need for professionals to establish modes of social integration that go beyond the interpersonal and local levels of traditional communities of practice. Drawing on the work of Karin Knorr Cetina on ‘object‐centred sociality’, it is suggested that knowledge and alignment to the more abstract world of theory may play such a role. In this paper, we do this by way of a two‐step procedure. First, a brief summary of the key concepts and ideas in the development of Knorr Cetina’s theory is provided. Thereafter, these are used as a sensitising device to analyse the results from a project which has studied identity formation among students of nursing. The data, although quite exploratory in nature, illustrate how weakened social ties are being strengthened through commitments to more abstract and open‐ended knowledge projects and how these, in turn, contribute to the development of new and more timely modes of social integration among the students.