Making Foucault coach: turning post-structural assumptions into coaching praxis

ABSTRACT

Foucauldian-inspired coaching practices have been a recent focus in the Foucauldian coaching studies literature. There can be no denying the emergence of a number of ethical coaching practices in synergy with Foucault’s work, yet in most coaches’ everyday practices there appears to have been little uptake. Accordingly, our central concern in this paper is considering how Foucault’s work could become a more deliberate feature of coaching. Using Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms, we argue that more significant change is yet to occur because coach education does not include the post-structural paradigmatic assumptions underpinning Foucault’s work. As a result, coaches immersed in a modern disciplinary logic may interpret Foucauldian-inspired practices through incommensurable assumptions. In this paper, we develop numerous post-structural assumptions into coaching post-structural praxis (CPSP) to demonstrate what those assumptions mean for coaches’ knowledge and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Kuhn
• theory
• paradigms
• post structural
• praxis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Jones et al. (2016) similarly critiqued modernist learning as a “do-this and do-that” transmissive process ignoring the complexities of coaches’ socially constructed realities. To better access these realities by continually questioning their practices, they developed the post-structural work of the education scholar, Robin Usher in conjunction with Foucault, to offer two coach practices: a step-by-step deeper analysis of the construction of their knowledges and practices and a series of critically reflective questions that coaches could ask themselves.