Valuable selves: Potentiality and temporality in work-related coaching

Coaching as a field of work and as an empirical focus

Coaching is a rather new line of work, and for the time being, the coaching industry does not have a unified body of knowledge, methods or guidelines for practice (George, 2013: 182). This of course allows for a wide range of different services and practitioners to fall under the label of coaching and makes generalizations difficult. However, the definition given by ICF that I cited above is rather apt in that it directs attention to what is central to most forms of work-related coaching: a focus on personal transformations and an intertwining of what is seen as personal and what is seen as professional.

The clients of coaches range from executive managers to unemployed young people. Molly George (2013) who has studied the professionalization of life coaching in the United States suggests that insecurity in the ‘new labour market’ (p. 179) has facilitated the emergence of coaching as a new kind of occupation and sustains a consumer base for the services provided by coaches. Some coaches start working as a coach precisely to minimize the risks they encounter in the labour market – although some coaches also claim that coaching is rather a means to do something ‘more humane’ or meaningful after long years in business, for example (Mäkinen, 2012). Also, the services that the coaches provide are directed both to those seeking to secure their place in the labour market and to those in search of an improved self – and most often in coaching, these aspects are viewed as two sides of the same coin.

Coaching as a field of work transcends categories usually taken for granted in researching occupations. It is situated in-between private and public sector, as many coaches work in both. They may, for instance, be employed by private businesses which provide coaching services for public sector, or they may work as independent entrepreneurs that sell services for businesses as well as for public sector.

Molly George (2013) claims that coaches can most accurately be described as ‘expert service workers’ (p. 180) since they transcend the occupational categories of higher-skilled, higher-paid professional work and lower-skilled, lower-wage frontline service work. As expert service workers, coaches combine elements of both these categories. George (2013: 181) also claims that this type of work has thus far been mostly ignored in the literature on work and occupations, which explains why the literature on work-related coaching is for the most part rather uncritical and consists mainly of studies in human resources management and psychology. Apart from exceptions such as George’s research, sociological or critical studies on work-related coaching are yet rather hard to find.

My own empirical research on coaching was originally for a doctoral thesis in which I examined questions of self-promotion, gender and individuality (Mäkinen, 2012). The analysis that I present here is a development of this work and is thus based on analyzing research material that I collected for my thesis in the years 2007–2011. This research material consists of interviews (17) and of different textual documents related to coaching such as books (4), coaching companies’ websites (29) and online or newspaper articles (37). ¹ The interviews were informal individual interviews except for one in which two persons were present, and each lasted approximately for an hour. The interview questions concentrated mainly on what the interviewees thought on coaching as a field of work and on what kind of practices their coaching work consisted of. Because gender was one of my research interests, some questions also dealt with the significance of gender in terms of coaching. In addition to the interviews and the textual documents, I also did an introductory coaching session via Skype with one of the interviewees, attended two coaching lectures and received notes from two others. ² The interviewees were both men (7) and women (11), but all the lectures were given by men. In the analysis that follows, I draw mainly from the interviews but the other textual material functions as a background against which I interpret the singular accounts given by different coaches.

The methodological approach that I employ is qualitative textual analysis based on analyzing discursively produced and maintained frames (Adkins, 2005; Callon, 2007; Goffman, 1990). On the one hand, framing means drawing boundaries, separating something from everything else and hence bringing it into existence (cf. Fraser, 1999). On the other hand, framing refers to staging, setting up a frame within which action becomes intelligible and meaningful (cf. Goffman, 1990). My focus on frames and framing relies on an understanding of frames as a part of a discursive struggle – frames participate in defining reality, in defining what ‘makes sense’ to us (Hennessy, 1993).

In practice, looking for frames in the research material has meant looking for discursive patterns and repetitions. I have in particular paid attention to repeated themes and expressions, words and phrases and in this way pieced together intertextual connections – the ways in which different texts communicate with each other. In addition to looking for patterns, I have also looked for gaps and contradictions in the logic of the texts and the interviews. Here, I have followed the insight of symptomatic reading (Hennessy, 1993) which is that ruptures in the logic of the texts might not be solely textual but could also tell of ruptures in the structures of society.

Immaterial production and anticipatory economy: breaks and continuities

While the notion of post-Fordism is here employed as a rather broad conception that refers to the forms that Western capitalism has taken from 1970s onwards, in what follows I will specifically discuss coaching in relation to theories concerning ‘immaterial capitalism’ and immaterial (or affective) labour. The notion of immaterial labour is often used as a key in understanding the current socio-economic organization (Camfield, 2007; Hardt, 1999; Hardt and Negri, 2000; Lazzarato, 1996; Toscano, 2007), and it contains particular formulations of both labour and value which to me seem relevant to understanding coaching as work and the centrality of personal transformations in coaching.

The concept of immaterial labour relies on a theory that emphasizes paradigmatic historical changes. These changes consist of two radical shifts in the formation of economy and the consequences of these shifts in terms of the whole society: from the dominance of agriculture to the dominance of industry and from the dominance of industry to that of services and information (Hardt, 1999). According to this scheme, at the moment, we are living in an age of informatization and postmodernization in which all production tends towards the production of services and towards becoming informationalized (Hardt, 1999: 92). This passage to an informational economy involves a change in the quality of labour and the nature of labouring processes (Hardt, 1999: 93). Since the service sectors have come to dominate the economy and since the production of services results in no material commodities, the labour involved in this production can be dubbed immaterial labour which produces immaterial goods such as service, knowledge or communication. Coaching as a field of work would seem to fall directly into this category, for its products are never material things but precisely services, knowledge and communication.

While immaterial labour can refer to ‘computerized’ labour of manipulating symbols and information, another face of such labour is the affective labour of human contact and interaction which for Michael Hardt (1999), for example, is the more important aspect of immaterial labour, ‘the binding element’ (p. 95), and which is of course also central to coaching. Affective labour is often corporeal (such as care work) but its products are intangible: social networks, forms of community, collective subjectivities and biopower (Hardt, 1999: 96). In short, what affective labour produces are forms of life.

Furthermore, Maurizio Lazzarato (1996) notes that the centrality of the ‘living labour’ (p. 2) within production means that capital needs to establish command over subjectivity itself; the prescription and definition of tasks in organizations transform into a prescription of subjectivities. We should all ‘become subjects’ – a slogan which, as Lazzarato (1996) claims, both mobilizes and clashes with the very personality of the individual worker (p. 2). In other words, immaterial labour is subjectivity, and thus the production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control and becomes directly productive (Lazzarato, 1996: 8).

Crucially, in the context of immaterial labour, Foucault’s notion of biopower is redefined as being from below as well as from above. On the one hand, affective labour – the production and reproduction of life – has become firmly embedded as a necessary foundation for capitalist accumulation as well as for patriarchal order (Hardt, 1999: 100). As Lazzarato (1996) states, ‘the fact that immaterial labour produces subjectivity and economic value at the same time demonstrates how capitalist production has invaded our lives and has broken down all the oppositions among economy, power and knowledge’ (p. 8). On the other hand, however, the production of affects, subjects and forms of life presents ‘potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation’ (Hardt, 1999: 100). Immaterial labour then contains both the most extreme forms of oppression, alienation and commodification and the potential for liberation.

The theories of immaterial labour provide a challenge for a researcher examining work, working life and subjectivity as they direct attention to what is at stake in current capitalist production: the production of life and of subjectivities and the simultaneously oppressive and emancipatory aspects of this production.

Furthermore, the theories of immaterial production contain implications concerning temporality. The idea of harnessing value across the social body implies that in contemporary capitalism, value does not reside necessarily and solely in abstracted units of labour-time but ‘increasingly in sets of vital relations’ as Lisa Adkins and Eeva Jokinen (2008: 139) as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) among others have suggested. If any moment or any act can be labour, then measuring labour-time becomes impossible: ‘The very qualities of labour power (difference, measure and determination) can no longer be grasped, and similarly, exploitation can no longer be localized and quantified’ and ‘[…] because of the globality of biopower every fixed measure of value tends to be dissolved’ (pp. 209, 355). This novel orientation to value breaks with previous theorizations ³ in which labour is ascribed a specific temporal structure which is about the past, ‘like a package of capacities, abilities, and qualifications’ (Adkins, 2008; Adkins and Jokinen, 2008: 144–145) and especially it breaks with Karl Marx’s Law of Value (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 209, 355–359). ⁴ Instead of a package of capacities and abilities which are developed, accumulated and stored up over time, it is suggested that labour is now organized with reference to an open and vital future (Adkins, 2008). For web designers or consultants, for example, value does not reside in past labour-time but in potential leads, potential customers or potential loyalty (Adkins, 2008). Another example of such futurity could be the world of financial markets in which futures (future expectations, potentialities and possibilities) are bought and sold as commodities. In short, it seems that the current form of capitalism in several ways compels ways of being oriented towards a future (Adkins, 2011).

Although it is easy to be inspired by the fresh visions and insights of the theories of ‘new economy’ and immaterial or affective labour, one might nevertheless also want to maintain cautious distance. Whereas Hardt (1999), Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and other Italian autonomists (e.g. Lazzarato, 1996, 2004) see immaterial labour as paradigmatic for the contemporary economy, there are other voices that remind us of the limited scope within which the paradigmatic nature of immaterial labour can be observed in empirical research (Camfield, 2007; Kaitila et al., 2009; McDowell, 2009; Nolan and Slater, 2010).

Furthermore, if one thinks of the harnessing of value from workers’ subjectivities, it might be sensible to take into account that already Marx’s (1976 [1867]) theory of value production contains the notion that workers and their subjectivities are never really separate from the labour power that they sell: ‘By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description’ (Marx, 1976 [1867]). The question concerning immaterial production is then perhaps not a question of a radical paradigmatic change but rather a question of whether the contemporary formations of labour and capital contain aspects which intensify the inclusion of subjectivities and life in general in the production of value.

In a similar way, the anticipatory character of the economy is not necessarily a new feature, for, as Angela Mitropoulos (2011) notes, the strategies of accumulation in capitalism have always involved the valorization and management of future risk, ‘the trading on minor differences, securitization, speculation and forward contracts’. Orienting towards future is thus not new in itself (also Adkins, 2011) – but there might be some ways in which such orientations are now formed that differ considerably from those of the past.

Keeping these critical insights in mind, my purpose in this article is to set a dialogue between the often rather abstract notions of immaterial or affective labour and new forms of temporality and the empirical field of work-related coaching. I do this with a hope that such dialogue might shed more light on to what extent or in which ways the theories of immateriality in contemporary capitalism resonate with empirical accounts of working life.

Coaching, temporality and the production of potential

Practices of coaching, in all their variety, share a preoccupation with personal transformations which means that they also share an interest in what will happen in the near future. The coaches I interviewed were rather united in their opinion that what distinguishes practices of coaching from, for example, therapeutic practices or mentoring is precisely the goal-oriented structure of coaching: specific goals are set in the beginning of the coaching process and they are to be achieved within a particular amount of time (usually several months). As one coach explained,

It begins from, a coaching process always begins from defining a goal, but the content and character [of the goal] comes from the client’s aims, if the challenge is to do just one curriculum vitae, well that won’t take long, but usually there is the whole process of change intertwined, […].

Transformations or changes need to happen, and coaching cannot go on forever – it is not a form of continuous support for the worker or for the person coached but a process with a beginning and an end. One of the coaches described the temporal structure of coaching as a GROW-model (‘goal, reality, opportunities and wrap up’), meaning that first the goal is set, then the current situation and opportunities are evaluated, then the change is achieved and in the end the result is compared with the original goal. Transformations structure the practices of coaching with a specific attention to changes over time and anticipation for these changes.

There is thus anticipation in coaching, and anticipation both in terms of what will happen to the individual and what will happen with the career prospects or labour market opportunities of that individual once the personal transformation is achieved. The motivation for the transformations might come from accounts concerning past and present – being unhappy in current situations, looking for meaning in work, being bored, being insecure about one’s ‘employability’ (see Treanor, 2005) – but the hope of achieving something new is always bound to anticipation and thoughts about the future.

The temporality ascribed to practices of coaching, however, is not simply one of mere transformation in a set amount of time. Practices of coaching cherish a belief in an individual self (a ‘true’ self or ‘core’ self) that is actually already within the self and in a state of becoming, and can thus be discovered through a process of personal change facilitated in coaching (Mäkinen, 2012: 169–177). Transformation in coaching is thus not necessarily a straightforward transformation of becoming something else but rather a process of discovery, of becoming the person that one has (secretly) always been. In this sense, coaching can be seen as a practice answering directly to the demand to ‘become subjects’ that Lazzarato (1996) claims is central to current economy.

Furthermore, coaching seeks to ‘make visible certain things about yourself’ in order to create a good impression and enhance a person’s opportunities in any sphere of life, as is explained by a coach in the following interview extract:

So if you are a researcher and want to get onto research projects that in a certain way resonate with your know-how, if you make visible certain things about yourself it is more likely that you will be taken on by the kind of project that you yourself want, and you will not just drift into some place, and this is the starting point, kind of.

In this extract, the coach frames the academic world as if it were similar to dating services in which one passively waits to be ‘taken on’. To be chosen, one has to have an interesting character but one also has to create an impression of what one has to offer. The researcher is thus understood as if they were waiting for someone to pick them up based on their appearance (meaning more than just looks) which is a rather distorted view of the forms in which academic collaboration takes place, but nevertheless a view that the coaches apply to any sector of working life and in which the individual person is seen as someone who is basically trying to become desirable in order to find a right place and ‘not just drift into some place’. This is a view that legitimizes the importance that is placed in coaching not only on transformations but also on learning to present oneself in an advantageous way.

Whereas in dating services it is the looks that count, in the working life creating appearances is not so much a matter of looks but a matter of how one creates an image of oneself by ‘putting into words’ certain things, as another interviewed coach emphasized,

[…] when you think of your own strengths and needs for development so you’ll find those strengths, and we of course help with finding and putting into words these strengths. So that you can sell yourself to the employer, so that the employer will be interested.

Becoming a more ‘employable’, desirable or truer self in coaching involves not only finding the inner self but also building it up to resemble something of a brand, a recognizable product which can then be sold to the employer/customer. This is illustrated by a British coach Louise Mowbray on her website as follows:

There could not be a more urgent need for all of us to take a good look at the impressions we are creating in the minds of those who can and may affect our success in the future. (Leadershipbrands.blogspot.com, retrieved in 2011)

In practices of marketing, telling stories is a main vehicle for building up a reputation and making the product desirable. The same also applies to coaching in which the search for the inner self easily becomes an urge to ‘put one’s strengths into words’, to tell a story of one’s past and one’s personality in such a way that it forms a coherent narrative, a clear outcome, a sellable brand:

About branding, they ask whether you can manage brands if it is an image that is created in other people’s minds, well yes you can, it is about what you tell about yourself and when you tell it so many times, then gradually the image will merge with what you are as a brand. (Interview with a coach)

This emphasis is most apparent in the cases in which coaches claim to help persons to build ‘personal brands’. However, the idea of telling one’s past and one’s present in such a way that a marketable package is created also underpins practices of coaching in general.

In this context of telling stories of oneself, it is relevant to recognize that there is a particular relation between time and the construction of self through narratives. Here, I will briefly turn to Paul Ricoeur and his theory of narrative repetition.

Ricoeur (1980: 171) notes that both the theory of history and the theory of fictional narratives seem to take it for granted that whenever there is time, it is always laid out chronologically, defined by a succession of instants. Ricoeur questions this assumption of time as a chronological succession and claims that constructing selfhood through narrative involves a particular form of temporality – narrative repetition. This means that the conclusion of a narrative is actually the point from which the series of events constructing the story gains meaning and sense. As one looks backwards from the conclusion, it must be clear that this kind of ending required these particular events. If the narrative functions as a vehicle for achieving individuality or selfhood, then the protagonist in the end must possess a story which he or she can consider constitutive of his or her personal identity. Thanks to narrative repetition, this identity, which is the outcome of the narrative, is also already existent at the beginning of the story (Ricoeur, 1980: 180).

It is thus this kind of narrative repetition that one can recognize in the practices of coaching, in which the narratives that are told about the self-function as vehicles for achieving a particular form of selfhood and the transformations become part of these stories in which the end (the self after the transformation) is already somehow existent in the beginning. The temporalities at work in coaching are thus not simply linear but complex combinations of repetition and anticipation, of knowing already and becoming something new.

Such temporal complexity explains the currency that the notion of potential has in coaching. The transformations and the empowerment that is achieved in coaching are very often described in terms of finding one’s inner potential. This is because the notion of potential refers exactly to something that exists already but gains significance only in regard to the future. There is thus potential within the self, and through discovering or ‘maximizing’ that potential the self can transform itself into a better self and also into a self that is more ‘true to itself’. The following extract from an interview with a coach illustrates this significance given to potential:

I want to contribute to a person’s self … to a person’s level of identity in a way where I tell everyone that hey, you are really good, you’ve got enormous potential. A person can really use only maybe ten per cent of their intellectual capacities or resources in one life. This is the informed guess of researchers, ten per cent, which means that every one of us, every one, has an enormous reserve already; it is here within me, a great potential, to learn, to develop, to grow, anything. If we can make use of it. So I want to develop people’s perceptions of themselves, their identity, so that they realize that each one of us really has an enormous potential. And it is there, and it is up to me whether I want to use it or not, whether I want to know that side of me, what I could do if I only wanted, if I open the door that leads to learning.

The interviewee here utilizes a common myth often cited in self-help literature, namely that people use only 10 percent of their full intellectual potential. While the interviewee claims that this is the informed guess of researchers that is hardly the case, since there is much contrary data (Della Sala and Beyerstein, 2007: xx). ⁵ The assumption of unused intellectual capacities nevertheless serves here – as it often serves in popular psychology – as a legitimation for the promises of success and as a motivation for searching the potential within.

Even though potential is by definition something that already exists within the person, in processes of coaching nevertheless potential is also brought into existence in the sense that one becomes aware of its existence and hence it gains significance and value. It becomes acknowledged and cherished both by the self in possession of potential and consequently also by others. Viewed from this perspective, coaching can actually be described as the production of potential or alternatively as practices that facilitate the production of potential. However, within coaching, the discovery of potential is not of course spoken of as production but as empowerment and self-development.

Potential and flexibility

The coaches very much emphasize that coaching is not about learning; it is not about accumulating skills or developing abilities. Rather, it is the discovery, not actualization, of potential that contributes to the transformation of the self in question. Potential stays the same, but because it is not yet it cannot be thoroughly known – it is not something particular or defined but rather something that ‘rises to the occasion’ and is flexible. Potential is that something inside which makes the person able to adjust and survive in different situations. In this way, it can be claimed in coaching that ‘everyone has potential’ without having to provide any further definition of fixed skills or capabilities or to acknowledge that ‘discovering potential’ might require social or material resources that are not equally available to everyone. And as potential, in practices of coaching, becomes merged with self-development, this means that it is the individual self that becomes potent, that is, capable of being exactly what is needed in any given instance.

Maximizing potential or discovering potential in coaching can thus also be described as becoming a flexible self with capabilities to adjust to any task or situation. One of the ways in which the production of potent selves in coaching connects to value production, then, may be the value that is produced by taking advantage of workers’ flexibility in the labour market.

It is often claimed that the anticipatory character of the new economy means that organizations need to be able to think about the future and to be ready to adjust to any changing circumstances. Organizations thus have a need for a flexible kind of labour power – for workers who are capable of learning new skills quickly (Sennett, 2006) and of adjusting to new working environments and social relations (Heidegren, 2004; Otto et al., 2011: 611). The flexibility of organizations that is sought after thus practically means that the people working for organizations need to ‘flex’ in one way or another (Julkunen, 2008: 108). They are flexed and re-oriented, for instance, in different projects of life-long learning and re-education (e.g. Åkerblad, 2011; Ojala, 2010).

In connection to this, Richard Sennett (2006) has suggested that the ability to ‘rise to the occasion’ is actually one of the most important characteristics that employers seek when they are looking for workers. The following interview extract illustrates how the demands for flexibility and adaptability are acknowledged and responded to in coaching, here through references to ‘being the right kind of person’:

Employers demand the right kind of people, often formal competence is important but also the human as a personality is very important for the employer. He is looking for the right kind of person, the right kind of person is what employers want. A lot of things can be included in this right kind of person, but that they are flexible and customer service-oriented and all of these things are very important, but maybe it is, you have to be or you have to fit into the working community and suchlike, and this is what I try to tell people, that you have to think when you recruit that they will fit the team and work in it, because it takes so much energy if the person is the wrong kind of person for that team, but it is just, I think that in addition to professional competence there is more and more emphasis on the right kind of person.

Sennett (2006) claims that in the contemporary labour market, a person’s human potential is equivalent to their ability to move from problem to problem, subject to subject. In this context, then, the notion of potential very neatly encapsulates the demands for flexibility and adaptability in the labour market, and it is clear why ‘having potential’ will make the person into a ‘right kind of person’, one who is desirable or ‘employable’.

Potential has exchange value in the labour market, because employers are interested in it and willing to exchange money – to make a contract of employment – for the ability to use the employee’s potential for the benefit of the company or the organization. This is because employers – or more accurately, their organizations – think they can make profit with ‘potential’ – it contains something valuable and something that is anticipated to be of future use.

In order for potential to be given this value in the labour market, however, it has to be articulated or somehow made evident. Lauren Berlant (2010: 94) notes that when we talk about an object of desire, we are talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. To become desirable in the labour market, one has to be able to articulate ‘a cluster of promises’ concerning potentiality – in practice this means that one has to be able to articulate a cluster of promises of flexibility, adaptability and capacity for self-improvement and learning. Potential is then something that promises to make flexibility possible not only for the individual but for the employing organization – and finally it might participate in making flexibility possible in terms of the whole economy.

In this sense, potential might be thought of as a particular form of labour power, and here the suggestions of the future-oriented temporality of labour power in the contemporary economy become relevant. For potential appears as a form of labour power in which value does not lie in a package of skills collected in the past but rather in promises and expectations concerning the future. The value of potential lies precisely in its undefined nature – it is not something that could be named or measured or that could be collected over time in one’s person. The production of potential in coaching might thus be seen as an example of the novel orientation to value to which Adkins (2008) refers.

This anticipatory aspect of potential in coaching however does not mean that value would be solely future-oriented. On the contrary, the time needed to find the potential, that is, the time that the coaching process takes, can actually be understood as the labour-time needed to build the commodity/labour power that is then sold in the form of potential. In this sense, the orientation towards future in coaching does not self-evidently testify to the irrelevance of, for example, Marx’s (1976 [1867]) theory of value in which the value of commodities is defined by the labour-time used to make them, and labour-time is defined as the time needed to produce the commodities in a certain society with certain forces of production. Contrary to Adkins’ (2008; also Hardt and Negri, 2000) suggestion, then, the past that is the time spent in the past in producing a commodity called potential is not insignificant to the production of value in coaching.

It could also be said that any contract of employment is about making a promise or commitment in terms of an anticipated future: a worker seeking to make a contract of employment is always making a selling proposition which concerns the future and a promise concerning things that he or she will do or be. Similarly, any act of buying and selling can be understood in terms of anticipation of the future.

The temporal aspects in the production of potential in coaching can thus be said to contain both the past and the future. The past concerns the production of potential that demands a particular amount of labour-time in coaching. Once this labour of ‘finding the potential within’ is done, potential-commodity can then be taken to the labour market in which it has exchange value because it signifies future promises of surplus value to the employers.

The reason for taking into account the time taken to produce potential in coaching is that this is the time that could also be used in any other way – it is not a coincidence that so many people are choosing to use their time in order to develop their ‘employability’ instead of concentrating on other significant aspects of their life or subjectivities. The practices of coaching can be perceived to lie in the same continuum as any other work that takes up workers’ time and that can also be measured in terms of time-units. The difference to factory-work for example is that being coached is not work in a recognized form, and it is inextricably tied to non-economic goals and values as well (such as ‘growing as a person’), which makes it of course harder to say whether it is time taken to labour or ‘free time’. Labour, however, does not have to be measured in terms of the individual’s desires or feelings (one might think of other forms of work as part of growing as a person as well) but rather in terms of abstract labour-time – and if potential is a commodity that can be produced in coaching, then it is not impossible to measure the abstract labour-time taken to produce it. ⁶

In this way, examining the implications of potential makes visible not only the new anticipatory aspects of capitalism but also the ordinary temporalities that continue to structure value production and acts of selling and buying labour power and other commodities.

Distinguishing potential

What makes the promises articulated as potential differ from other selling propositions is then not simply the orientation towards future but the undefined character of these promises. The promises encapsulated by the notion of potential are more open than a promise to be able to cut wood or spell correctly, for example. Instead of offering a valued skill, the promised capability of potential to produce surplus value lies in its openness. This openness, however, might also pose a problem for the production of value in the form of potential, and especially for the person seeking to add their exchange value and to become irreducible by offering potential in the market. This is because the competitive characteristic of the current economy (Harvey, 2005) demands not only potential but also distinctions – in order to become ‘employable’ in the labour market one needs first to articulate promises of undefined capabilities and second to distinguish these promises of potential from those made by others.

I suggest that in coaching, potential is both articulated and distinguished by attaching it to individuality through personal narratives. I have already noted that learning to tell stories of oneself is a central focus in coaching, as the following quote from one of the coaches also illustrates,

My own work has been, very much, such that I’ve only drifted somewhere, and the same is – well, now as it is told afterwards, I thought if you wanted I could show you this case about how your career, when you tell it as a story, it might yet look very consistent. And that’s what coaching is maybe partly about, that a person tells a story about themselves, about certain things they want to emphasize.

Finding one’s inner potential is not enough as such, for one also needs to be able to tell of one’s past and one’s personality in such a way that it forms a coherent narrative (‘it might yet look very consistent’) which proves that one is precisely the kind of individual that the employers are looking for.

In the interviews and texts that I examined, the coaches told stories that implicitly proved that the self in question, that is, the protagonist of the story, was capable of flexibility and of ‘rising to the occasion’. In particular, several of the women that I interviewed told narratives in which they defeated an environment that was hostile to women. In these narratives, the injustices concerning gender were mentioned, but only as a context against which the protagonist of the story could emerge as a surviving individual full of capacity and flexibility. The narratives transformed gender from a cause of hardship to a resource, asset and finally a proof of the women’s personal potential (Mäkinen, 2012). ⁷

I interpreted the coaches’ stories as telling of the kind of narratives that they also encourage their clients to produce – these stories were not told to me by accident but with a certain purpose, and they demonstrated a particular skill of telling stories which is precisely the skill that the coaches employ in their work when they help their clients to ‘put into words’ their inner potential.

Crucially, in these stories, the self that is the protagonist of the narrative emerges as an autonomous, individual, capable self full of promises of future abilities (Mäkinen, 2012). It is thus in the production of a particular kind of selfhood and individuality through narratives that also potential is brought into being in coaching. In this process, developing or growing as a human being and becoming ‘employable’ are entangled and intertwined in such a way that they become one and the same. Finding the inner self and becoming capable of expressing one’s individuality is both the goal of self-development and the goal of a production process the outcome of which is potential-commodity.

If one considers Lazzarato’s claim that capital needs to establish command over subjectivity itself, the production of not only potential but also selfhood and individuality in coaching might be thought of as an example of how this kind of command is achieved in a way which rewards the subjects with being recognized as individual and autonomous and simultaneously serves the needs of capital offering precisely the kind of labour power that is needed for immaterial production. This said, it should however be noted that serving the needs of capital is not necessarily the final purpose that can be achieved in coaching. If one considers the liberating potential that for the theorists of immaterial labour is the other side of biopower from below, there is of necessity always more in such practices as coaching. Once autonomy and empowerment are stated as explicit goals – as they are in coaching – a space is opened up also for subjectivities which do not serve capital but rather seek to challenge and question its power. Coaching does not encourage such questioning, but it does not completely foreclose it either. There is no reason to celebrate coaching as an empowering practice, but there is no reason either to assume that the contradictions inherent in practices of coaching would go unnoticed by those being coached – or that ‘finding one’s inner self’ might not on some occasions turn into an emancipatory force not only for the individual but also for collective subjectivities.

Conclusion

In this article, I have drafted a tentative account of the ways in which practices of work-related coaching connect to contemporary forms of value production. Examining the intertwining of individuality and potential in practices of coaching, I have focused especially on the aspects which appear relevant in terms of immaterial and/or affective production and the new temporalities this production seems to imply.

In conclusion, practices of coaching bring together different notions of ‘potential’: potential as an individual possession and part of one’s individuality and potential as a form of labour power and a commodity which is valued in the labour market. This mixing of different forms and understandings of potential is telling of coaching as a form of work that ‘mixes’ or merges subjectivity and individuality with economic value production. It is precisely this merging, I suggest, that is referred to in theories of immaterial labour as the harnessing of value across the social or the centrality of the ‘living labour’. Whereas the theoretical accounts of ‘immaterial labour as subjectivity’ (Lazzarato, 1996: 8) are often abstract and descriptive, examining the temporalities inscribed to the different notions of potential gives us some clues as to why and how such merging of economic production and subjectivities might take place.

Above I have pointed out how the anticipatory character of the economy transforms workers/subjects into flexible individuals full of undefined potential and how coaching participates in this production of potential and of individuality. While Lazzarato (2004: 193) suggests among others that in an anticipatory economy production has to be ready to anticipate changes in the market, I have noted that in practice this means that individuals working in and for production need to develop capacities which help them to both anticipate the future because it has become increasingly insecure or precarious (Åkerblad, 2011) and provide flexibility to the organizations in need of it. Coaching can be seen as helping to do both: It promises security because of better capabilities to respond to the demands that the future might bring, and at the same time, it produces intangible ‘potential’ which has exchange value in the labour market. The merging of value production and subjectivity is thus not something that is merely brought upon the subjects but rather something that serves a purpose for those taking part in it and that also promises autonomy and feelings of empowerment to be gained in the process.

Whereas paying attention to the anticipatory aspects of the contemporary economy might explain why there is such a need for potential and an encouragement to become a ‘potential individual’, examining the temporalities inherent in the production of potential also shows that orientation towards future is not the only aspect of temporality in this production. Taking into account the time spent in coaching means that contrary to what is often claimed, questions concerning the measuring of time are not irrelevant to immaterial production. The production of potential is not simply about the promises of future capabilities but is also about the time involved in ‘discovering the potential’ in coaching. I suggest that this perspective of spending time in becoming a better self is significant, and even though measuring labour-time might be more complex when it comes to immaterial production, it is not something that should be laid aside or replaced by claiming that value is now future-oriented. Rather, taking into account both the orientation towards the future and the past labour involved in it might provide more rounded perspectives also on the so-called new forms of work – of which coaching might even be viewed as a paradigmatic example.