Conclusion

Our main point here is that fake kindness is a specific form of symbolic violence through which the dominants assert their power in asymmetric social relations. The effectiveness of fake kindness doesn’t rest on deception – fooling victims into believing that they are facing a well-meaning interlocutor – but on limiting the social repertoire victims can use.
The nature of fake kindness also makes it a sneaky expression of symbolic power whose effectiveness rests for a large part on institutional complicity to support and sustain it. Professional organizations and regulators, academic settings and care delivery institutions that incorporate and enforce strong civility and propriety requirements will also boost both the prevalence and effectiveness of fake kindness.
In our view, the conceptualization of fake kindness that we developed is especially relevant for nursing. The profession’s enthrallment for caring as a behavioural and moral compass constitutes it as a social field especially propitious to fake kindness. While proponents of the caring mantra likely believe they are supporting a healthy and supportive professional and institutional culture, we do not share this simplistic and optimistic view. The structuring of social expectations and rules that the caring culture fosters might have more to do with maintaining existing hierarchies and enforcing obedience than with anything else. We believe that professions which create the underlying conditions for fake kindness to be effective and prevalent will also fosters a context propitious to bullying. In this context, we would leave the last word to Walker “The idea that a ‘good nurse is a nice nurse’ […] is no longer viable in the 21st century ” [21]