Une histoire de vocation ? Comment les aides-soignantes occultent le processus de transmission de leurs compétences professionnelles.

une enquête France/Québec

Abstract

This article aims to show how nurse’s aides working in geriatric organizations in France and Quebec represent themselves the process by which professional skills were transmitted to them. We conducted twenty-four semi-structured interviews with nurse’s aides in France and twenty-three in Quebec (Canada). Our results show that nurse’s aides use a specific rhetoric, that of vocation, to explain the meaning of their professional career. This rhetorical use allows them to represent their path in the order of continuity. In order to structure this belief, nurse’s aides create themselves an identity of debt, by identifying themselves as recipients of aid sent by their family, including women. They say that they have a moral obligation to make this gift to seniors living in geriatric organizations. Thus, using the rhetoric of vocation, the nurse’s, in France and Quebec, obscure the process of transmission of their skills. The division of memory allows them to more readily accept the challenges of the profession and to “hold” against difficult professional situations.