The unwanted organisational items trapped in learninglessness

Purpose – This article aimed to understand the normative expectations that shape nursing students' experiences of daily supervisory interactions. It challenges context-independent, survey-based and shows how violations of antecedent recognition and care generate moral harm and learninglessness. Design/methodology/approach – The study used a critical-interpretive approach and drew on 42 semi-structured life-world interviews, which were thematically coded with attention to the research question. The analysis incorporated two sensitising concepts, “antecedent recognition” and “care”. Normative reconstruction was applied to establish the basis for immanent critical evaluation. Findings – The analysis constructed two themes, “being treated as an unwanted item” and “being trapped in learning-less-ness”, relating to the normative expectations students rely on when evaluating supervisory behaviour. Students expect to be recognised as future colleagues and human beings. Instead, they are treated as an imposed task, left without a supervisor, or openly ignored during the allocation of supervisory responsibilities, reducing their empathetic engagement in learning. Students identify themselves as learners and expect supervisors to support their learning needs, but encounter both direct and indirect misrecognition, undermining their self-trust, restricting access to practice and fostering learninglessness. Originality/value – The present study proposes a new method for examining abusive supervision by reconstructing the immanent normative expectations that shape employees' evaluations of their experiences with supervisor behaviour and emphasising the moral dimension of learning, as recognising learning needs and access to practice are normative claims, and misrecognition is a moral harm leading to a state of learninglessness.