Managing the academic mind: Hierarchy and control as a contemporary issue in nursing academia

This article examines the persistence of hierarchy within nursing education and argues that its replication in universities represents a serious contemporary issue for the discipline. Drawing on recent scholarship, sociological theory and critical reflection, it explores how managerialism and audit culture in nursing schools reproduce the hierarchical structures historically embedded in nursing. These structures, inherited from colonial, patriarchal and classed traditions, are sustained through institutional cultures that privilege visibility, control and compliance over intellectual freedom, reflection and care. The argument developed here is not that nurses welcome control, but that the profession has been socialised into systems of authority that constrain both clinical and academic practice. Within nursing faculties, this manifests in the surveillance of work, performance metrics and the erosion of academic autonomy. Such conditions, it is argued, damage not only individual wellbeing but also the legitimacy of nursing as a field of knowledge. Using the lens of Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Skeggs's analysis of value and respectability, this article highlights how hierarchy reproduces classed and gendered inequalities in nursing academia. It calls for a reimagining of leadership that prioritises relational ethics, trust and intellectual freedom. The issue is international in scope: the corporatisation of higher education and the managerial governance of academic labour affect nursing educators across diverse national contexts. Reclaiming autonomy, therefore, is not only a local struggle but a collective, global imperative. The future of nursing education depends on our ability to teach and lead without permission, to create academic spaces grounded in care, critical inquiry and the courage to dissent. • Reveals how managerialism sustains hierarchy within nursing academia • Examines loss of autonomy and trust through audit and surveillance cultures • Uses feminist and sociological theory to expose classed, gendered inequality • Argues that control damages care, creativity, and intellectual freedom • Calls for relational leadership grounded in trust, ethics, and critical inquiry