Beschreibung: |
Despite its business orientation, executive coaching is person-centered and integrates feelings-talk to initiate (work-related) change for the client. As coaching is an instrument of human resources development offered to executives by their organizations, those organizations do not only pay for the coaching and (pre-)select the coach, but often also take an interest in the topics by authoring (written or oral) statements covering what should be addressed in the coaching sessions. Coach or client (taking the role of principal and animator, cf. Goffman 1979) introduce the organization's voice when establishing coaching frame and coach-client relationship and must position themselves regarding these views and the third party itself. While clients may adopt the organization's view as worthwhile, dispute or even reject it, it is among the coaches' responsibilities to integrate the (perhaps disputable) view of the organization, i.e. to acknowledge the third party and its interest, and concurrently to foster a good and confidential relationship with clients by claiming sufficient independence. This triadic constellation alters the dyadic social interaction 'coaching', causes a potential conflict of interest for both coach and client and represents one of the core paradoxes of coaching (Bjorkeng et al. 2008; Graf in press): The coaching alliance is conceptualized as the sine qua non for clients to open up, to access and work with their emotional experiences, while the triangular relationship and the coaches' dependence on the paying organization threaten the confidence and intimacy of this very alliance. Both participants must therefore manage – on a turn-by-turn basis – complex identity work. In this paper, we analyze the local impact of the third party 'organization' in the dyadic coach-client conversation. We apply a CA perspective by focusing on sequences from first sessions of different coaching processes (the corpus comprises of 145 hours of authentic coaching data), where coaching frame and relationship between coach and client are established (cf. Graf in press). By drawing on membership categorization and positioning theory (see, e.g., Hitzler (2011) and Deppermann (2013)), we discuss communicative association and dissociation practices whereby clients position themselves as organizational representatives or as independent executives. These invoked self-categorizations bear on the categories clients ascribe to their coaches and on the actions clients and coaches (are expected to) perform (e.g. accepting or challenging the coach's authority). Concurrently, the positions client and coach discursively adopt and/or are ascribed to with respect to the organization impact on their relational identities during the coaching sessions (managed e.g. by terms of address or emotional displays). We present patterns of how association practices with the third party result in distancing practices from the coach-client dyad and vice versa. |