Academic leadership in nursing: legitimating the discipline in contested spaces

Aim  To investigate the potential of recent conceptual developments in the sociology of education for conceptualising academic leadership in nursing.
Background  During an investigation into the current status and future trajectory of academic nursing in Ireland, academic leadership emerged as a major concern for respondents.
Method  The languages of legitimation of academic leaders were elicited in in-depth interviews and analysed as expressions of underlying legitimation principles.
Results  The concept of legitimation principles provides a way of thinking about how academic nursing is positioned in the health and higher education sectors, how its leaders construct its identity, practices and purposes, and clarifies the proper focus and goals of academic leadership in nursing.
Conclusions  Academic leadership is concerned with legitimating the discipline of nursing as an autonomous, coherent and distinctive professional and academic endeavour. This legitimacy must be secured in academic, clinical and wider contexts in which academic nursing is viewed with ambivalence; leaders must take account of the impact of nursing history on the current status and future trajectory of the discipline.
Implications for nursing leadership  The analytic tools facilitate a better understanding of the internal and external conditions under which academic nursing will flourish, or wither, in contemporary higher education.