Given the prevalence of instrumental and positivistic accounts on coaching, our article aims to contribute to a critical theory of coaching by articulating two under-researched topics in the field: power and space. We do so by building on the Lefebvrian political approach to space; more specifically, we show that depending on the coach’s experience of the coaching space, three types of power relationships are produced within the coach–coachee–organization triad: independent, mediated, and parallel. Accordingly, the coaching space appears to be either a generator, supporter, or analyzer of power. Overall, by approaching coaching as a political space, we call for increased awareness of the conditions that facilitate the experience of the coaching space as empowering rather than limiting and controlling.

Through a study of 20 semistructured interviews using the critical incident method, this article explores the nature of the multiple agendas within the triangular relationship that connects the coach, coachee, and an organization and the challenges associated with their management. The article suggests prerequisites to coaching program applications as well as learning approaches to help coaches embrace the power dynamics associated with their intervention.

Neutrality in coaching, as an often‐mentioned yet under‐theorized norm of practice, is illustrative of how a lack of conceptualization leaves professionals with eclectic and contradictory tools and techniques. Therefore, the current study examines coaches' attempts to practice neutrality, with diverse implications for their conceptions of professional practice. Through a qualitative study of 57 executive coaches using a critical incident technique, we identify situations of conceptual and practical complexity. The ongoing practice of enacting neutrality gave rise to diverse tensions, to which coaches responded by formulating individualization and socialization strategies that had different consequences in terms of forms of awareness. Considering neutrality in terms of situated, engaged, and processual practice, we use these findings to theorize its enactment within the interest‐laden world of organizations. Our study contributes to the theory and practice of coaching while also furthering understanding of the dynamic nature of seeking neutrality in professional contexts.

Our study examines collective identity development in the early stages of a social movement as it narratively unfolded on Twitter during the 2019 October revolution in Lebanon. Based on a sample extraction of Twitter content from the first month of the revolution and using both thematic and narrative analyses, our study uncovers an entangled temporality where past, present and future strands of narrative time intervene in online identity narratives. Disentangling these digital narratives enabled us to identify three temporal-thematic categories that outline the contours of the emergent online identity: a revisited narrative past evoking collective nostalgia, a disruptive narrative present creating an urgent “presence in the now,” and a prefigurative narrative future that allows online members to collectively re-imagine and co-create their collective selfhood. Taken together, these findings support better understandings of collective identity emergence in digitally-mediated social movements in three different ways. First, building on the organizational literature on temporality in collective identity formation, we highlight how temporal narratives online support and accelerate a nascent collective identity through their immediacy and global reach. Second, by approaching narrated time theoretically and not chronologically, we address recent calls that challenge linear temporal narratives. We highlight how entangled temporality contributes to the emergence of a social movement’s online collective identity. Ultimately, from a methodological perspective, we offer an approach for “disentangling” digital temporality and propose (ante)narrative theory as a useful interpretive lens for better apprehending identity-relevant social media content.

Dans des contextes organisationnels dominés par la complexité et le changement, le coach apparaît comme un tiers légitime pour accompagner les acteurs dans leur développement. Lui sont alors attribuées des vertus de facilitation, de bienveillance, de faible directivité, au service du coaché et/ou de l’organisation. Cette vision positive, voire « positiviste », de ce rôle de tiers est questionnée par des approches dialectiques qui mettent l’accent sur des phénomènes de pouvoir inhérents aux organisations qui vont bousculer le coach dans cette posture idéale. Le coach n’est pas à l’abri de phénomènes d’instrumentalisation, de sous-traitance, de dérives affectives. Quel rôle de tiers le coach a-t-il vraiment dans les organisations ? Cette étude tente de répondre à cette question en analysant les écarts entre posture idéale et posture effective. Dans une démarche compréhensive, au travers de la méthode de l’incident critique, nous avons réalisé 20 entretiens de coachs en se focalisant sur des expériences et événements qui les écartent de leur position idéale de tiers ; ils ont chacun abordé une situation mettant en jeu des agendas cachés ou plus largement un défi éthique. Nous avons alors analysé à l’aide d’une analyse thématique de contenu leurs représentations de leur posture idéale de coach et les dérives associées. Nos résultats conduisent à souligner le défi que représente pour le coach la gestion de la bonne distance à l’organisation, en tension entre le don du sauveur (« Zorro ») et l’instrumentalisation (« Polichinelle »). Notre recherche donne donc des fondements empiriques aux perspectives critiques et dialectiques du coaching qui soulignent les dérives instrumentales dans la pratique. Au-delà, elle invite notamment coachs, recruteurs et formateurs à prendre en compte la dimension du politique de toute action de coaching.