Interaction, asymmetries of knowledge and experience and the impact of theory on the in situ practice of coaching

Abstract

Coaching is often presented as an equitable working alliance between a coach who has theory-driven expert knowledge and a coachee who has knowledge of himself/herself. However, whilst this assumption is widely promoted in coaching literature, little research has sought to investigate the in situ practice of coaching in which these different territories of knowledge are negotiated. Using Cooren’s notion of communication as a form of ventriloquism as an approach to the analysis of data taken from a corpus of 21 naturally occurring career coaching interactions, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how the coach’s mobilisation of theory impacts the in situ practice of career coaching. The findings indicate that the interplay of the coach’s theory-driven knowledge and the coachee’s experience-driven knowledge is not necessarily as harmonious as the coaching literature assumes. We close the paper by advocating a critical approach to analysing coaching interaction that may have payoff for practice.