Dissertation Research - Coaching as an Emerging Form of Professional Expertise

这项科学与社会论文改进基金为博士论文提供特定的“领域”研究资金，研究私人教练作为一个专业领域和新职业的出现，超过15,000名教练，仅在美国就在不断增长。教练是一种专业服务，为客户提供日常生活和工作中基于行动的指导。目前有几个独立的领域，有着不同的历史和认证实践，包括对高管的指导，对研究生的指导，或者对日常生活中的平凡任务的指导。这个项目将分析教练作为一个新的专业和专业化领域的发展，以及对美国人自我观念变化的考验。使用民族志方法，它将结合对专业教练和教练客户的采访数据，在教练研讨会和会议上的参与者观察以及对教练领域出版物的分析。数据收集和分析将借鉴科学研究、文化人类学和社会学的理论工作和现有研究。指导这项研究的最初假设是：(1)教练正在通过内部和外部的差异变得专业化，这有助于将教练定义为日常生活领域的一种合法的专业知识形式。(2)教练是一种新兴的职业，它利用学术的自我理论，但把它们包装成一种新的专家自助形式。在这个过程中，它似乎正在发展一种谈论自我的新词汇，侧重于务实的行动和实践，而不是自我反思。(3)虽然教练可以被看作是美国自助传统的延伸，但它也自相矛盾地创新了将自我完善视为依赖专家的做法。我的论文假设，这种新的专业知识正在影响人们如何协商自我和个人主义的意义。辅导，因此提供了一个新的和战略性的网站来促进(a)专业知识和专业化的研究，这在社会学和科学技术研究（STS）中都有文献；(b)美国文化中自我观念（自力更生、自我完善和自我塑造）的转变，这方面既有社会学、社会历史和心理学方面的文献，也有医学人类学和STS交叉领域的重要新兴文献；(c)新兴文化和政治经济对自我观念的改变。

This Science and Society Dissertation Improvement Grant provides specific "field" research funds for a Ph.D. dissertation that examines the emergence of personal coaching as a field of expertise and a new profession with over 15,000 coaches and ongoing growth in the United States alone. Coaching is a professional service providing clients with action-based guidance in their daily lives and work. There are currently several discrete fields of coaching with different histories and accrediting practices, including coaching for executives, for graduate students, or for the mundane tasks of everyday living. This project will analyze the development of coaching as a new field of expertise and professionalization as well as a crucible for changing notions of the American self. Using ethnographic methods, it will combine data from interviews with professional coaches and clients of coaching with participant observation at coaching workshops and conferences and analysis of publications in the coaching field. The data collection and analysis will draw from theoretical work and existing research in science studies, cultural anthropology, and sociology. The initial hypotheses guiding the study are: (1) Coaching is becoming professionalized through internal and external differentiations that help define coaching as a legitimate form of expertise over the domain of everyday life. (2) Coaching is an emergent profession that is making use of academic theories of self, but packaging them as a new form of expert self-help. In the process, it seems to be developing a new vocabulary of talking about the self that focuses on pragmatic action and practice rather than self reflection. (3) While coaching can be seen as an extension of American self-help traditions it is also paradoxically innovative in positing self-improvement as expert dependent. My dissertation hypothesizes that this new kind of expertise is influencing how people negotiate the meanings of self and individualism. Coaching, thus provides a new and strategic site to contribute to (a) the study of expertise and professionalization, on which there exist literatures both in sociology and Science and Technology Studies (STS); (b) the shifts in notions of the self (self-reliance, self-improvement and self-fashioning) in American culture, on which there exists literatures in sociology, social history and psychology, as well as an important emerging literature at the interface of medical anthropology and STS; and (c) the emerging culture and political economy of the changing notions of the self.