Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text - Paperback

by Simon Western (Author)

Coaching is often discussed as if it is a new ′profession′ without adequate attention to how it has evolved, what underpins its practice or its training methods. Situating coaching in a wider social and historical context, Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text reveals that contemporary ′coaching theory′ is more a collection of models and approaches mostly transferred from psychotherapy theory. Coaching claims to liberate creativity but can also entrap us by individualizing social experience. Author Simon Western brings a fresh and critical perspective on coaching and mentoring, challenging its normative assumptions and narratives, and proposing an ethical and emancipatory approach that takes it beyond instrumentalism and individualism.

Key Features:

• Accounts for how coaching has emerged and what discourses and normative practices underpin and influence contemporary coaching practice
• Develops a meta-theory of coaching that acts as a baseline for future developments
• Offers frames of thinking to support and guide coaching and mentoring practitioners and educators

This is a must read for coaches, mentors and coaching educators, and students and academics studying coaching and mentoring at both advanced undergraduate and graduate level.

Author Biography

Simon Western is CEO and founder of Analytic-Network Coaching Ltd, an avant-garde coaching company whose purpose is to 'coach leaders to act in good faith to create the good society' www.analyticnetwork.com. He is an internationally recognized thought leader on leadership, coaching and organizational behaviour. Taking his unique experience and an unusual theoretical position into the workplace, he draws on critical theory, networked theory, social movement theory and psychoanalysis to help leaders develop new insights, act ethically and create progressive change in organizations.