Dissertation Research - Coaching as an Emerging Form of Professional Expertise

这个科学与社会论文改进补助金为博士学位提供特定的“领域”研究资金。这篇论文探讨了个人教练作为一个专业领域和一个新的职业的出现，仅在美国就有超过15，000名教练和持续增长。教练是一项专业服务，为客户提供日常生活和工作中基于行动的指导。目前有几个独立的教练领域，具有不同的历史和实践经验，包括为高管，研究生或日常生活中的平凡任务提供教练。这个项目将分析教练的发展作为一个新的专业知识和专业化领域，以及为改变美国人的自我观念的熔炉。使用人种学方法，它将把联合收割机从与专业教练和教练客户的访谈中获得的数据与在教练讲习班和会议上的参与者观察以及对教练领域出版物的分析结合起来。数据收集和分析将从科学研究，文化人类学和社会学的理论工作和现有研究中汲取。指导本研究的初步假设是：（1）通过内部和外部的差异化，教练正在变得专业化，这有助于将教练定义为日常生活领域的一种合法形式的专业知识。(2)教练是一种新兴的职业，它利用了自我的学术理论，但将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，这种词汇侧重于务实的行动和实践，而不是自我反思。(3)虽然教练可以被视为美国自助传统的延伸，但它也是自相矛盾的创新，将自我完善定位为专家依赖。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。 因此，教练为以下方面的研究提供了一个新的战略性的研究领域：（a）专门知识和专业化的研究，社会学和科学技术研究（STS）都有关于这方面的文献;（B）自我观念的转变（自力更生、自我完善和自我塑造），社会学、社会史和心理学都有关于这方面的文献，以及一个重要的新兴文献在界面的医学人类学和STS;和（c）新兴的文化和政治经济学的不断变化的概念的自我。

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.