This study investigated the language used to describe, explain, and interpret the concept, 'nursing process' in four introductory nursing textbooks. The method of interpretative inquiry was the description and analysis of text based on Paul Ricoeur's interpretative theory of hermeneutics and Jurgen Habermas' communication action theory. The study focused on the ways that language or linguistic activities are constitutive of the social-historical reality of nurses. Themes related to tradition, rationality, and power relationships were explicated and interpreted.

The meanings appropriated from the textbooks reflect a world in which nurses are struggling for professional autonomy within a society that has not fully legitimized nursing's status in the health care institutions. Medical authority and dominance over nursing practice emerged as a primary theme. There is a belief that as nurses develop their own body of knowledge, the traditional modes of thinking in nursing practice such as intuition and common sense experiences, will be replaced with more legitimate and therefore more rational forms of knowing. Technical rationality is highly valued in research and education and it is also the standard for judging alternative forms of formal inquiry.

The world of the text disclosed how nurses interpret their professional autonomy and how normative structures inform what constitutes authority and responsibility in research, education, and practice. To understand the nature of social reality as being linguistically constructed is not a common understanding in the community of nurses. From this perspective, the language and rationality of all four textbooks limit the possibility of self critique and reflection. Without a language that allows for communicatively competent nurses who can critique, reflect, and take responsible action, the potential of reconstructing an autonomous profession is not likely.