Performances of Legitimate Expertise Among Life Coaches
Three Rhetorical Strategies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2392291 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tamar Kaneh‐shalit (Tel Hai Academic College, corresponding author), Tamar Kaneh-Shalit (Tel-Hai College, Israel) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1071-1087 |
| Publication date | 2023-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociological Research Online (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1360-7804 • E-ISSN: 1360-7804 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/13607804221128316 |
| OpenAlex | W4309561845 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 29 |
In the global crisis of expertise, experts are often viewed with skepticism. This article zooms in to this crisis to analyze how life coaches seek professional legitimacy and verbally perform their expertise by navigating a tension between asserting their authority and cultivating their clients' agency. Performances of expertise are a range of verbal practices and rhetorical strategies that are co-produced and shaped through interacting with clients. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at three life coaching training schools in Israel, I show that life coaches perform their expertise through the following strategies: (1) defining the problem that coaching addresses as simple, significant, and mendable; (2) using authoritative charismatic speech to define clients as powerful, independent agents who are their own life experts; and (3) creating reflexive experiences of self-revelation by using semi-intelligible jargon. Finally, the study advances the understanding of expertise as performances inextricable from clients' sense of agency
Charisma · Charismatic authority · Coaching · Engineering ethics · Epistemology · Ethnography · Jargon · Legitimacy · Linguistics · Meaningful life · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Reflexivity · Rhetorical question · Skepticism · Social science · Sociology · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Social Psychology
Saving the Modern Soul
Down and Out in the New Economy
Fools Rush in? The Institutional Context of Industry Creation
The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance.
Lifestyle Work
Talk like an expert
The Sacred Self
Self-Help, Inc
The Poetics of Therapeutic Practice
Fashioning Futures
Communicating Expertise
Professional image under threat
Rhetoric of epistemic authority
The Interpretation of Cultures
The Individualization of Class
Complicity, performance, and the 'doing' of sports coaching
A Magical Reorientation of the Modern
Humour in Sports Coaching
Time Is Our Commodity
Enactments of Expertise
Seeking Legitimacy
Skills and selves in the new workplace
The Goal Is Not to Cheer You Up
Breastfeeding Support
For a Sociology of Expertise
Neoliberal Agency
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |