While the analogy between personal development and capitalism has been pointed out, it is important to investigate the actual practices that support this claim. This article presents the main conclusions of a vast ethnographic fieldwork study conducted in France in the social world of coaching in the late 2000s and updated in the late 2010s. It shows that coaching is both an indicator and a vector of the transformations of work and its modes of mobilization, which outline a personal turning point for capitalism. The ambiguity is that coaching also presents itself as a remedy for these changes and their contradictions. It establishes the individual as a regulator of professional tensions, with the paradox that in this way it contributes to relieving the organization of its responsibilities.
- Executive coaching
- personal development
- transformations of work and labor
- leadership
- independent professionals
- politics of the individual