The Discourse of Coaching. A Linguistis Analysis

The goal of my linguistic Habilitation is a functional description of the discursive practices in person-oriented business coaching. Contrary to other formats of professional and institutional discourse, such as doctor-patient interaction or therapeutic talk, the discursive interaction of executive business coaching has so far not been the topic of linguistic analysis. The search for answers to the overall research question `what is really happening in coaching from a communicative perspective and how is this interactively realized?` constitutes important basic research. A special analytic focus will be on the question how coach and client construct their respective roles and identities in and through the interaction and especially, how far this particular interaction is influenced by the lack of a clear professional underpinning of the format business coaching. Furthermore, the research addresses the hybridity of the discourse of coaching and the question whether there are coaching-specific discursive norms and characteristics that allow for the differentiation of coaching from neighboring discourses such as psychotherapy. The exploratory development of concepts and analytic categories for the linguistic description of the discourse of coaching is thereby embedded from the outset in the interprofessional dialogue with coaching practitioners. This guarantees the analysis of `real phenomena` instead of `intellectual fabrications` that originate from a joint problematization and perspective alignment between my discourse research and the coaching practice. Despite its immense proliferation in the business world, coaching has not - neither on the Anglo-American- nor the German- speaking market - been established as a profession with clear standards with respect to accreditation, examination and qualification. As the linguistic findings of the current basic research are intended in a future project to contribute to this professionalization and conceptualization debate, this analysis is also of great practical relevance. In my interprofessional analysis, I will describe the discourse of coaching along its thematic, interactional and structural lines with the help of an integrative methodology of Conversation Analysis (CA), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and pragmatics. Whereas CA in its text-immanent approach focuses on the sequentiality of turns and the architecture of intersubjectivity, CDA stresses the interdependence of communication and the social and cultural contexts (i.e. the discourse of coaching as a type of professional and institutional talk between experts and laypersons and the resulting asymmetrical power and responsibility structures). In addition, general pragmatic concepts such as emotive communication, framing, and footing as well as the concept of activity type will be applied. The analysis is based on video-taped coaching-processes adopting the person-oriented professional business coaching approach "Emotional-Intelligent Coaching". The material is transcribed with the help of HIAT (semi- interpretative working transcription). As there are no comparative results available yet, the focus on this particular coaching-approach allows its relevant categories to be captured, while future studies can position themselves with respect to these findings.