Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic (EMCA) studies of coaching in sport: a coaching special issue

Introduction: locating ethnomethodology

The relatively short and turbulent history of scholarship in sport coaching reflects the trajectories of previous and ongoing debates found in sociological scholarship. One consequence of this alignment has been that contemporary coaching scholarship has argued for more careful attention to the interactional production of local order as the collaborative work of coaches in-action (e.g. Evans, 2017; Sánchez-García, Fele, & Liberman, 2018; Corsby & Jones, 2019). This argument has been inspired by one of the most influential sociological currents in interactional studies of work, which has been the ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA) tradition. Here, creative practical work activity, irrespective of the setting, is viewed as emergent interactional collaborative work in situ, rather than merely the following of abstract instructions. With these developments in mind, a small group of scholars engaged in studying sport met at Trento University, Italy, for a three-day workshop in September 2022 to share and discuss the methodological practices and research findings of their EMCA studies of sport.¹ One of the themes emerging from of the workshop, while recognising the extant literature advocating an appreciation of the “social component” in coaching (Purdy, Jones & Cassidy, 2009; Jones, Potrac, Cushion, & Ronglan, 2011), was the relevance of ethnomethodological studies of sport coaching and their potential importance for coaching scholarship more generally. The specific EMCA themes raised were around the actual social practices that underly coaching competence and how this is tailored and deployed in the specific interactions that constitute coaching as it emerges in the coaching situation.

Attempts to capture the everyday endeavours of coaching have a history of critical debate among coaching scholars, much of which can be found in Sports Coaching Review, and this special issue is another contribution to that work. However, whereas various scholars have attempted to shed light on the shared world of coaching through the use of theory driven approaches – examples have included analysis drawing upon Goffman (Jones, 2006; Partington & Cushion, 2012), Foucault (Denison, 2007; Avner, Denison, Jones, Boocock, & Hall, 2021), Bourdieu (Cushion & Jones, 2006; Cushion & Jones, 2014; Townsend & Cushion, 2015), among others – the sociological practice of introducing a theoretically derived analysis a priori to determine “what is going on” has been a longstanding critique by ethnomethodologists (see Garfinkel, 1967, 2002, the founder of ethnomethodology, for examples of this critique). It is not that coaching studies have ignored members’ practices as such, but that coaching studies stressing the importance of every gesture have done so with an a priori agenda, such as relating to whether (both personal and professional) respect is secured, maintained, or lost (Potrac, Jones & Armour, 2002; Jones, 2006, 2007, 2009; Jones et al., 2011). Such an aprioristic approach to analysis has, in the ethnomethodological critique, failed to locate members’ “perspective” as revealed in the detailed work of their collaboration practices, and the competences they deploy in producing their actual coaching activities. This is where Garfinkel advocated a study of members’ own practices as the starting point; that is, for the cases presented in this special issue, to study coaches’ ethno-methods.

A brief outline of ethnomethodology and EMCA: unique adequacy, reflexivity, and the everyday accomplishment of members’ practices

For ethnomethodology, and the closely related field conversation analysis, much of the sociological studies of work, including coaching, can be accused of glossing over the details of members’ practice for accomplishing order; details Garfinkel described as the “missing interactional what”.² Garfinkel’s (1967, 1986, 2002) proposal was to recover the practical and interactional production of constituent practices. Button, Lynch, & Sharrock, (2022) recently re-invoked this argument by clarifying ethnomethodology’s radical departure from importing theoretical and methodological constructs to explain “the ordinary actions and expressions that organise social activities” (p.2). For EMCA,³ then, ordinary activity is already ordered through the ways in which members produce them. Therefore, the challenge for ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of coaching is to carefully describe the detailed work individuals are involved in to constitute their social order (not abstract academic or training manual theoretically imposed versions). Therefore, EMCA studies necessarily examine the mundane, routine, everyday accomplishments of members’ practical activities, within sport coaching. By removing a preoccupation with pre-defined theoretical positions, ethnomethodological studies favour what Garfinkel (2002) called the “haecceities” of ordinary activity; that is, the “just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who is here, in just the time this local gang has” happening embedded in the activity (Garfinkel, 2002, p. 99).

Although the relationship between sport studies and ethnomethodology is less substantial than studies of areas such as medicine, law, computing and technology design, ethnomethodological and conversation analysis investigations of sport and leisure have a long history (see Tolmie & Rouncefield, 2013). Studies of a diverse range of sports related settings, including football (Fele, 2008; Izquierdo Martín, 2003), Basketball (Macbeth, 2012), Kung Fu (Girton, 1986), long-distance running (Allen-Collinson, 2006; Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2013), rock climbing (Jenkings, 2013), yachting (Button & Sharrock, 2013), surfing (Sánchez García & Liberman, 2021), Aikido (Lefebvre, 2016), and fly fishing (Lynch, 2013), to name but a few examples, have examined the situated accomplishments of participants. Similarly, the corpus of ethnomethodological and conversation analysis studies have also explored sports team altercations (e.g. Evans & Fitzgerald, 2016), netballers’ communications during defensive play (LeCouteur & Feo, 2011), as well as handball time-out talks (e.g. Meyer & Wedelstaedt, 2019).⁴

In all cases, these studies respecify what the work undertaken by members at the sites of these professional and amateur activities consists of, including detailed descriptions of the mundane practices that are relied upon, and constitute, members’ knowledge in action. However, detailing these practices requires the researcher to have members’ knowledge of the activity; knowledge that is not abstract, but which is, to some degree, performative competence: after all, what is being studied is members’ own knowledge that consists within performative competence. This is a key contribution to the methodology of sports studies. In brief Garfinkel (2002) maintained that the researcher must become a “vulgarly competent” member in the setting under study, which was termed the “unique adequacy requirement of methods” (Garfinkel, 2002). Thus, Garfinkel (2002) maintained that the researcher must be “in a concerted competence of methods with which to recognize, identify, follow, display, describe, etc., phenomena of order* in local production of coherent detail” (ibid. p176).⁵ While the aim of this section is not to provide a comprehensive overview of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, a brief word on the ethnomethodological use of reflexivity may be useful.

As described by Lynch (2000), reflexivity for ethnomethodology is treated as an ordinary, unremarkable, and unavoidable feature of action. In contrast to positional reflexivity as an academic “virtue”, allowing readers to judge whether the researcher may have particular biases that they bring to the research and which is often be found in the social sciences, the ethnomethodological treatment of reflexivity can promote epistemic democracy. This epistemic democracy helps explain the ethnomethodological “indifference” to theory as mentioned earlier, where instead of relying upon extant formal concepts in theory (and training manuals) to describe social actions, the ethnomethodological approach lies in examining members’ knowledge as revealed in their practice of accomplishing their ordinary work-place affairs. This means paying the utmost attention to how such actions are made orderable; of how such apparently mundane behaviour is constructed and, subsequently, made sense of to achieve their undertakings, including sports coaching. In this regard, Lemert (2002) recognised that Garfinkel’s investigation of the rational, mundane, and ongoing practical accomplishments of individuals has inspired empirical work in many different areas, including medicine and health care, crime and justice, communications and media, education, and gender, among many others. In this special issue we bring together a series of studies to facilitate our understanding of sports coaching and hope to initiate further debate on the utility of ethnomethodology and EMCA in and for the discipline – and to encourage more ethnomethodological and EMCA collaboration in studies of coaching. First, though, it is worth briefly extending the summary of what has been achieved thus far.

Ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies of sports coaching

If we are to better understand the practices of coaches and athletes, we argue that ethnomethodological and conversation analytic insights hold the potential to make an enduring contribution. Except for a few notable examples (e.g. Miller & Cronin, 2012; Okada, 2013; Evans, 2017; Corsby & Jones, 2019), ethnomethodology has yet to permeate much of the coaching research. Indeed, Miller & Cronin (2012) adopted an ethnomethodological stance to critically review conceptualisations of coaching that abstractly theorise what coaches do, meanwhile Jones & Corsby (2015) critiqued the cognitivist decision-making literature for neglecting the social and interactional context that participants reflexively construct. Whilst Miller & Cronin (2012) and Jones & Corsby (2015) asserted the value of ethnomethodological analysis for coaching research, both examples remain theoretical. Alternatively, a notable study by Groom et al. (2012) provided an empirical case for conversation analysis to focus the structures constituting coach-athlete interactions. Although this shift towards observable-and-reportable phenomena is welcomed from an ethnomethodological and conversation analysis perspective, the paper resorts to conventional sociological explanations in the analysis (e.g. “power”). Doing so meant the analysis treated the participants’ actions as analytically interesting only when they relate to the a priori analytical interests of the research team; a fundamental point of divergence from the original conception of conversation analysis (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970; see also Button, Lynch, & Sharrock, 2022).

Notwithstanding such criticisms, there has been a recent surge in specific coaching oriented empirical examples of ethnomethodological works. This includes Evans (2017) analysis of naturally-occurring coaching activity in basketball, to demonstrate how participants reflexively orient to correction sequences in the athletes’ play. Here, the multi-modal analysis revealed the collaborative action involved to constitute correction-initiation by the coach. Further refining the analysis of coaching, Corsby & Jones (2019) drew upon an ethnographic study of semi-professional football to examine the visible, tangible, and contextual details of coaches’ observations. In turn, the study provides an ethnomethodological respecification of observation in coaching, not as a visual act, but as a locally organised achievement of those involved. In a similar vein, using video recordings of an on-court basketball altercation between players, Evans & Fitzgerald (2016) explored the morally accountable actions of members to make sense of the players’ actions. The analysis offered by Evans & Fitzgerald (2016) specifically focuses on membership categorisation devices to inform the analysis (see also Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015 for a discussion).

Furthermore, the anti-foundational and anti-formal analysis of ethnomethodology, which should not be glossed as simply interactionist analysis, helps to locate critiques of the “rationalistic”, “decontextualised”, and “reductionist” analysis often found in biomechanics, physiology, and psychology for coaches. Indeed, such critique lies at the very core of the theoretical models explaining skill acquisition and sports learning; for instance, information processing, which conceives cognition as a computation of symbolic representations, and ecological dynamics (a blend of J.J. Gibson ecological psychology and dynamic systems). That is because those foundational and formalising models are predicated upon a methodological individualism that essentially neglects the social dimension constituted in and through the complex embedded and embodied interactional work that participants sustain in their concerted actions. To remedy such pitfalls, Sánchez-García et al. (2018) offered an ethnomethodological respecification of some of the same topics as conceived by the information processing and ecological dynamics paradigms in skill acquisition and sports learning, showing instead these topics are understandable as competent members’ emergent and locally produced collaborative practices. It is important to note that even though the enactive perspective in skill acquisition and sports learning deals with the so-called social dimension through the study of interpersonal coordination in sport (Bourbousson, Poizat, Saury, & Seve, 2010), it falls short of capturing the praxeological nature of interactions as proposed by EMCA. Such studies are interested in the “shared understanding” or the “sharedness of cognitive content” of players, focusing on an internal notion of cognition instead of a situated joint interpretation of the players through communication and coordination of actions (Sánchez-García & Muntanyola-Saura, 2021).

Albeit brief, this overview emphasises how ethnomethodological and conversation analysis can further reveal the fundamentally social and contextual practices of coaching by examining the ongoing accomplishments of the participants (coaches and athletes) party to coaching practice. Despite their mundane and seemingly banal nature, such work attempts to explicate many features of coaching practice that currently remains taken-for-granted and unexamined. In this regard, the significance of EMCA work lies in better grasping the reflexive, everyday practices of coaching that are fundamentally social, local, and contextual in nature. Therefore, in an effort to reclaim some of the analytical rigour and uniqueness offered by ethnomethodology, it is the intention of this special issue to bring together a range of studies that illustrate the “doings” of coaching. It is hoped such analyses demonstrate both the reach and significance of ethnomethodological analysis by explicating the local, orderly, and often taken-for-granted practices of coaching. Put another way, the ethnomethodological studies are concerned with what ten Have (2002, p. 5) described as the “embodied in local, situated and intelligible practices” of coaches.

Overview of this special issue

Taken together, these articles represent the breadth and range of topics open to Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. Although the articles cover a range of topics from professional fighting to broadcasting, they are united by their ethnomethodological and conversation analytic approach to the studies. Yet, each paper stands alone in terms of their contribution to EMCA and the wider study of sport and coaching. In this regard, rather than taken coaching as a formal term that can be used to define and explain a range of activities, the studies locate coaching within the local production of order. This means the studies attend to a range of practices members engage in that constitute “coaching”. A brief overview of the contributions is provided below.

Firstly, Ulrich Von Wedelstaedt provides an illustration of boxing coaches’ methods for engaging with professional boxers during training, fight preparation, and actual fighting. Using video recordings, transcripts, and drawings of video stills, the paper moves beyond treating boxing as an individual sport, to demonstrate how boxer and coach achieve a joint corporeality. What makes this paper particularly interesting, then, is how such endeavours are geared towards enhancing the boxing performance. However, as Wedelstaedt notes, the connection between coach and boxer remains fragile and delicate when under the stress of the opponent. While Wedelstaedt shows how coaching situations, depending on rules, degree of professional involvement, or other circumstances, can be somewhat unique, the analysis considers how proto-social matters in the research of sports, coaching, or embodied conduct have often been ignored when designing, implementing, and supporting coaches’ development and education.

In a similar vein, Charlie Corsby’s article, “The wild contingencies of coaching”, makes a shift away from the coach as merely a by-stander on the side line in football, to demonstrate the artful practices of trying to “find” meaningful performances when coaching football. To detail the artful practices of coaches’ “discovery work”, the study draws upon a corpus of approximately 20-hours of audio-visual recordings of football training sessions and match-day footage, combined with first-person embodied accounts of coaching. The examples comprise creating joint attention, improving discovery, accelerations of established problems, and silence in discovery. In this way, rather than treat coaching as an imposed system, the article attempts to demonstrate how discovery work remains an ordinarily structured yet locally emergent and ongoing procedure that coaches use to collaboratively establish a shared perception of the athletes’ performance and development. What such ethnomethodological analysis does, then, is to demonstrate the blind spot of members’ methods of doing discovering performance. In other words, the article offers a respecification of coaching practice as the result of the members trying to order, in an observable and reportable fashion, the wildness of the match.

Next, Giolo Fele and Gian Marco Campagnolo’s article, “Seeing bad luck”, which focuses on the skills involved to gain insight from visual evidence within a tactical analysis session. The analysis refuses to treat video data as self-evident, but rather, the authors use the practices of an amateur football team to show how the coach draws the attention of players to specific incidents. In the case under study, the coach demonstrates how the incident that later leads to a penalty was a case of “bad luck”. Using multimodal analysis of video recordings of the tactical video analysis, the paper shows the reflexive relations between repeated replays of an incident and the members’ descriptions of what they see. In turn, the paper provides four ways in which the participants used the video: 1) using still images to give a name or label to the episode; 2) making apparent what is seen on video through bodily re-enactment; 3) zooming out from specific aspects of play to consider a larger configuration; and 4) considering the event within the extended temporal development of the action. For Fele and Campagnolo then, coaching, when using video data, is not primarily about correcting positions or movements, but rather, the members are engaged in facilitating understanding of what “really” happened on the pitch. Such analysis recognises the work as a prerequisite for attributing responsibility to players.

Raul Sánchez-García’s article, “Coaching parkour”, shifts the coaching practice to parkour, an informal, non-competitive sporting activity known under different labels such as extreme, alternative, whizz, action, or lifestyle sports. Based upon data from an eight-month participant observation, Sánchez-García presents an alternative EMCA perspective on the ethnomethods of coaching parkour. It specifically addresses the emotional dimension of coaching parkour: the tension balance between confidence and fear, expressed in the negotiation of expectancies upon athletes’ performances on each occasion. The paper considers coaching not as a one-way transmission of knowledge from the one who knows (the coach) to the ones who do not (the athletes). Instead, coaching is praxeologically produced through a complex interactional system made of instructions, performances, expectancies, examples, copying, mimicking, and adjusting the personal execution of movements to the solutions found (or not) by the others and the concerted expectancies among participants (coach and athletes).

Junichi Yagi’s article, “‘Five’ or ‘ten’”, provides a multimodal conversation analysis to build upon existing error-correction studies in sport coaching. Drawing on a single-case analysis, Yagi examines an extended correction sequence in Muay Thai coaching. The analysis provides a detailed account of co-operative correction through demonstrating a series of phases. This includes illustrating the opening phase in which the participants negotiate the norms regarding the training procedure, examining the normative organisation of correction, and how the indexicality of the coach’s correction can be remedied by members’ practical knowledge about Muay Thai. Yagi’s study uncovers how each phase involves practical tasks that need to be resolved on the spot, and how this requires both the coach and athlete to adjust to the contingencies of the setting/activity. In turn, the analysis shows the practical procedure of correction is built upon specific correctable features that both parties collaboratively locate in the prior performance.

The final paper to comprise the special issue is by Laurent Camus, titled “The sequential and reflexive achievement of coach participation in the live TV broadcasting of football”. Far from traditional coaching research that is preoccupied with the activity on-the-ground, Camus scrutinises the interactional practices by which the coach, on the side-line, is perceived, filmed, and described by TV technicians and commentators. Camus’ contribution offers an empirical investigation of the local procedures, sequentially ordered, by which coach participation in the game is reflexively achieved. It adopts the perspective of TV control room members while broadcasting football matches to show how they produce real-time audio-visual and verbal accounts tailored to the emergence of the coaches’ embodied and verbal actions. Camus’ fascinating study highlights the relevance and importance of the coach’s actions in producing audio-visual accounts of the match and how broadcasters make sense of it. The paper shows how TV professionals reflexively accomplish the coach’s participation by producing the visibility and audibility of the coach’s actions and mobilising it as a resource for the match’s narrative.

Acknowledgments

We would like to finish this editorial by thanking the authors and reviewers for their diligence throughout the process. The reviewers have been exceptional in terms of their criticality, patience, and willingness to encourage meaningful contributions to the body of EMCA studies in sport. In response, the authors have all demonstrated great humility when revising their work, which has undoubtedly improved the overall scholarship.

Finally, we would like to again thank Dr. Giolo Fele for starting this process with his generosity, time, and effort at Trento University. It is a great pleasure to see this collection of papers in Sports Coaching Review. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We gratefully acknowledge the organisers for their time and effort to allow us the rare opportunity to discuss ethnomethodology and conversation analysis studies in sport. This special issue is an artefact of such space.

2. Throughout this special issue the papers will inevitably invoke the ethnomethodological jargon in their discussions and demonstrations of members’ local production of order. While the authors have made a concerted effort throughout their respective papers to explain such terms, ethnomethodology sometimes adopts a seemingly peculiar language. This is not gratuitous but is to explicate otherwise unexamined commonplace, tacit, and taken-for-granted understanding of people’s everyday practices.

3. The articles in this special issue reflect ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as connected approaches to the study of social action; ethnomethodology focuses on the production of situated and ordered social action of all kinds, while the specific focus of conversation analysis lies in the production and organisation of talk-in-interaction. For that reason, we have opted to keep the terms ethnomethodology and conversation analysis together. Differences in approaches can be found in the subsequent articles of the special issue.

4. See LeCouteur & Cosh (2016) for a review on the main contributions of conversation analysis in sport and exercise.

5. Some authors distinguish between “weak” and “strong” versions of unique adequacy. For a recent discussion on unique adequacy see Smith (2022).