Portrait of authority: a critical interrogation of the ideology of job and career coaching

Abstract

This article focuses on job and career coaching provided by a multinational company, as a means of learning how to become employable. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis informed by Fairclough, we interrogate tips and advice in blog posts written by job and career coaches on the company’s website. The aim of the article is to examine the power relationships between the coaches, the coachees and the employers in these tips and advice. The analytical focus is directed at descriptions of three subject positions–the coach, the coachee, and the employer. We explore the ways in which their relationships to each other are legitimised. The tips and advice shape a particular understanding of the contemporary conditions and challenges on the labour market producing an ideology of job and career coaching, where existing power relationships in working life are legitimised by portraying coaches as neutral authorities and coachees as commodities.