Coaching as a social ritual: acting on people in a liberal-individualistic society (parenting, education, mental health care)

Project Information

CoachingRituals

Grant agreement ID: 850754

DOI

10.3030/850754

EC signature date 7 November 2019

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 686,25

EU contribution

€ 1 499 686,25

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CoachingRituals (Coaching as a social ritual: acting on people in a liberal-individualistic society (parenting, education, mental health care))

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Who has not recently heard about how coaching could help people progress in so many ways? While coaching is an ubiquitous and elusive practice that has been thriving in places such as sport or work, it has entered virtually every domain of human life, as the key to a greater autonomy.

As the ability to fulfill one’s own potential, autonomy is, at a macro level, a social norm as well as a value at the core of liberal societies. However, in various social contexts, autonomy seems to act as an empty shell, leading people to quickly agree on its moral merits, but producing disagreements when questions arise about how to perform it and its consequences. Autonomy may be a desirable thing, but how to be autonomous and act accordingly? how to evaluate autonomy? and especially, how to foster peoples’ autonomy? These questions are controversial issues that create tensions and paradoxes.

Nowhere are these tensions more clearly manifested than in the processes and areas that are socially designated as responsible for making people (more) autonomous. Among these, mental health care, parenting and education are of primary importance. In all three fields, people are expected to build and repair the autonomy of other people – especially children’s –, when the latter’s ability to act by themselves is considered to be underdeveloped or damaged. These practices are historically based on an asymmetry between a person in an upper position (a parent, a teacher, a caregiver) and a person in a lower position (a child, a pupil, a patient) whose autonomy must be (re)constructed through healing or learning processes. However, they are nowadays confronted with the growing legitimacy of forms of intervention that, instead of acting asymmetrically on a child, a pupil or a care-receiver, tend to foster his/her agency in order to put him/her in control of his/her own change. New devices, new moral entrepreneurs who propose to develop a coaching approach take an increasingly important place in these fields.

The CoachingRituals project asks what exactly coaching is, and what are the scope, the significance and the effects of this ubiquitous but elusive social practice. How is it that coaching is seen as an effective and respectful way to change people and their behavior? What are the social and cultural conditions for the success and failure of this practice? How does it carry normative and stratifying factors?

Why is it essential to focus on it from a social science perspective? The study of autonomy as a practical category is a privileged way of understanding some of the main aspects, conflicts, difficulties and possibilities of life in what we can call individualistic societies – individualistic in the sociological meaning of a moral environment where the individual and the fulfilment of its potential is a key issue, a matter of social importance. Through autonomy, we address the representations (and the conflicts they may lead to) of what a human being is, what a good life is (a life worth living) and what the daily expectations are that weigh on everyone's shoulders. Moreover, we address what it means sociologically to intervene on other people in order to empower them. The project shows how coaching is a ritual in line with societies that value personal action and lifestyle, freedom of choice and autonomy, and deeply transforms the ways through which we act on and evaluate others.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The CoachingRituals team is made up of researchers in sociology and anthropology, women and men, juniors and seniors – but all dedicated and excellent! The project started with a state of the art: what are we talking about when we talk about coaching in each of the three fields? Who is talking about it and how? What are the common sense and scientific discourses around this practice?

A first objective was pursued and already met: the development of a sociological approach to coaching which is neither supportive nor critical of this practice. This milestone, progressively reached through an intense teamwork and a strong program of monthly international (online) seminars, is essential for a project aiming at understanding coaching as the socially acceptable language for acting with and on other people in liberal individualistic societies.

A second objective was to see how, in each field, the development and reception of discourses on coaching were linked to the more global representations taking place in different societies. Therefore, three controversies – three public disputes concerning ways of intervening on others:
1) On the mental health scene, we analyzed how movements are developing first around new labels, such as “voice-hearers” and “hypersensitive” to fight the classic and institutionalized psychiatric categories, but also around new practices, such as the revival of psychedelics in mental health care;
2) On the parenting scene, we focused on the debates around the definition of the child, its potential and the environment it needs, and how disputes arise around the evermore present movement of “positive parenting”, as well as around the growing concern for "parental burnout";
3) On the education scene, we have studied the debate between the pre-primary and the socio-pedagogical traditions, and movements mobilizing so-called alternative pedagogies (Montessori, etc.) and/or neuroscientific discourses to change the way to act with children.

Each of these controversies has been analyzed in a comparative perspective in three areas (FR/French-speaking BEL, UK and DK), in order to show how these moral evolutions and/or transformations can only be understood against the backdrop of particular moral, socio-economic and cultural contexts which are, in the three cases under study, declinations of liberal-individualistic societies.

The first results show the coherence of the logic and practices of coaching in the three domains beyond the differences. They also indicate that the new ways of acting on other people and their characteristics are not limited to actors who clearly identify themselves as “coaches”. The coaching logic is now a sociological object. Several publications and scientific events, such as an international workshop at Aalborg university which will lead to a publication by Routledge, allowed to show that focusing on how to make people autonomous makes it necessary to investigate what it means today to be a child, a pupil or a student, a person suffering from mental health issues, when these characters are supposed to have a “hidden potential” of abilities that need to be unleashed.
We also focused on the changes, difficulties and paradoxes in the definition of what it means to act on others in a respectful and efficient way: what does it mean to be a good parent, teacher or caregiver? Not only do they aim to produce autonomy, but the already-but-not-completely autonomous child, student or care receiver is expected to be the main character of these practices, and their competencies should be the starting point of any move.

After mapping the arguments mobilized by supporters and opponents of the coaching logic, the team began to explore empirical fields in the 3 scenes and the French and Belgian contexts. We observed hundreds of hours of coaching practices such as parental workshops, coaching for teachers, conferences for people interested in alternative mental health treatments, etc. We interviewed around 50 people who call themselves coaches and/or trying to change the way we educate, parent, or provide care. These large elements are currently analyzed, and the team is currently interviewing and observing parents, teachers and alternative mental health care givers, to see if and how, after having met coaching practices, they themselves transform their own practices, and with what consequences.

The main activities of the project so far include: 15 international seminars, a two days international workshop in Aalborg (DK), an international conference around (de)institutionalisation, a book project with Routledge, a significant number of scientific and large audience papers and communications.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This project already goes beyond the state of the art in many ways:
First, it can be said that the coaching logic has never been taken seriously (not in an immediately critical or supportive way), theorized and abstracted from our three analyzers as the project does. The whole team has been very active, since the beginning of the project, in engaging directly with various stakeholders in the three fields (see list of expeditions and interventions) far beyond academic circles: coaches, mental health caregivers, teachers and teachers’ associations, policymakers, etc. Each of these interventions is carefully prepared to allow the audience to understand why the researcher “stay out of the arena”, and how it strengthens stakeholders’ awareness of the ins and outs of their own situated discourse, practices and positions in a contested field. This is a very important know-how developed by the project members, which clearly establishes the collective dynamics around CoachingRituals as a recognized and central actor on this issue.

Second, we wanted to analyze, in a comparative perspective, the specificity of France and French-speaking Belgium, where the empirical fields will continue to be developed, with regard to the controversies around coaching. France and French-speaking Belgium are particular in two regards: first, the presence of the neuroscientific language game at all levels (commonsense and policymakers, i.a.). This language is directly referred to when entrepreneurs of the coaching logic stress the merits of the way they want to renew interventions on children: "now we know". Second, the tension between proponents of the idea of a potential to be developed in each child – thus implying to consider them as partners of adults, and proponents of the need to put a frame to children (and thus limiting them) is nowhere as strong as in this geographical area. This opposition structures the evolution of debates in the three scenes of parenting, education and mental health care.

Third, several characteristics of the coaching logic have been identified: a) an individualistic language opposing individual (and its potential) and institutions/society (seen as constraints), b) a perspective based on the empowerment of people through the reinforcement of (social and relational) skills, c) attribution of large responsibilities to the environment as the development or the crushing of the individual’s potential, d) the ability, on each field, to reconcile the languages of performance (effectiveness, accounting, goal-reaching) and well-being (self-esteem, emotions, etc.), e) emphasis on the transitive aspect of skills development: same expectation from the coaches (for example regarding emotional self-control), the people in an upper position and the children.

Fourth, we showed how many tensions in our individualistic societies nowadays crystalize around the pair "institution" (seen as oppressive) - deinstitutionalization (seen as a good process enabling individuals to unleash their potential). Proponents of the coaching logic are particularly active in criticizing any "institution" as imposing limits and barriers. This highlights the urgent need for a clarification of what we mean when we talk about institutions - and in particular the differences between common sense and sociological interpretation of institutions.

In the latter sense, the project aims to develop a theory of coaching as a social ritual for individualistic societies. This will be particularly valuable to better understand the dynamics of societies where the willingness and ability to act on oneself is increasingly becoming a new stratifying factor, while familiarity with such a logic is unevenly distributed among classes, genders, ethnicities and cultural environments. It will show that, in this regard, coaching is itself an institution.

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