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.
