Performances of Legitimate Expertise Among Life Coaches: Three Rhetorical Strategies

Abstract

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.