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.