Rethinking Coaching: Critical Theory and the Economic Crisis

Synopsis

Rethinking Coaching offers a spirited challenge to the paradigms that have of late dominated organizational life, most notably in the banking sector. The vehicle the authors propose as being best suited to encourage a comprehensive reassessment of the ideologies that have brought about the credit crunch is coaching. They set out a more radical approach to the practice based on scepticism, particularly as it has been developed from the later twentieth century onwards by key postmodern critical theorists. One of the reasons organizational ideologies go uncontested is that critics of destructive group-think are often suppressed and silenced. Overall, this book aims to show how coaching can widen its intellectual range such that it can become a progressively more effective technique within organizational life resisting group-think: a positive force for preventing crises of the kind that have caused such havoc in contemporary economic and political life, on a truly international scale.