The deconstruction and reconstruction of sports coaching: An interview with Professor Robyn Jones: A commentary

Introduction

It is with great pleasure that I write this commentary in response to the lead article. Professor Robyn Jones has proven to be a source of considerable scholarly inspiration. Through the adoption of a broadly interpretivist paradigmatic stance, my research seeks to respond to his 2005 call with Professor Mike Wallace for a ‘knowledge-for-understanding’ project. ¹ Like Robyn, I find myself interested in the micro-sociological analysis of sports coaching contexts. In pursuit of these ends, I tend to draw on the theorisation of symbolic interactionism, dramaturgy, and relational sociology. In the opening section of this commentary, I give thought toward Robyn’s observation that coaches often strive for acceptance and offer further evidence in support of this claim. In recognition that the relative success of a practitioner’s efforts to gain the social approval and acceptance of others can have significant implications for their sense of self, the second section of my commentary calls for a more explicit investigation of those means through which social relations and interactions impact on coaches, as well as other sports workers, well-being. Here, the work of Peggy Thoits^2–4 is offered as a potentially useful sensitising framework.

Microsociology: Micropolitical and emotional understandings

While reading those interview extracts contained within the lead article, I found myself particularly drawn towards how Robyn eloquently summarised his 2006 auto-ethnography (‘Dilemmas, Maintaining “Face,” and Paranoia: An Average Coaching Life’) ⁵ as being a story ‘about acceptance, marginalisation, and how we strive for acceptance in the eyes of others, in the way that we want’. This is an important and perceptive social observation; one that I suspect many of us can relate to both professionally and personally. It is an aspect of social life that has also featured quite prominently in those various research projects that I have been party. For a number of years, Professor Paul Potrac and I have sought to study some of the micro-political and emotional features of practice in coaching contexts; research agendas that Robyn has played a part in helping to establish.^6,7 Paradigmatically, much of this research has been conducted from an interpretive perspective, which has been characterised by a relativist ontology, subjectivist epistemology, and an ideographic methodology. ⁸ Consistent with this paradigmatic stance, our research has been principally concerned with examining how coaches, and other sports workers, make sense of their experiences and actions. ⁸ Through our collaborative efforts, inclusive of the various postgraduate students individually and collectively supervised, we have begun to chart some of the everyday social realities of work as experienced by sports coaches, auxiliary coaching staff (i.e. performance analysts, strength and conditioners and sports psychologists), athletes and coach educators.^9–21 In seeking to make sense of our participants’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours, we have drawn on a range of sociological theories. The work of Geert Kelchtermans,^22–24 Erving Goffman ²⁵ and Arlie Hochschild ²⁶ have proven to be particularly useful explanatory frameworks.

Like those participants in Kelchtermans’s micro-political analysis of teaching, a common finding for us has been that sports coaches, as well as other sports workers, attach a great deal of stock to their being recognised by significant others as competent practitioners. Our participants have shared with us how the performance-related feedback they had received during their interactions with significant others mediated how they came to judged what Kelchermans termed professional self-understanding, inclusive of perceptions regarding their self-image (i.e. how they typified themselves in their roles), self-efficacy (i.e. how they perceived they were performing in their roles), job motivation (i.e. their motivation to perform their job roles), task perception (i.e. what constituted their job roles, as well as those tasks they needed to complete to perform these jobs effectively) and future prospectives (i.e. expectations about their future career trajectories). Many of our participants have also discussed what they considered to be the vulnerable nature of their work. Further drawing on those analytical insights offered by Kelchtermans, we have come to understand that our participants rarely felt in control of their working conditions, and that their decisions and practices were often open to question. These findings can be seen in our narrative exploration of a performance analyst’s understandings of his early career experiences. ¹¹ Through our interactions with Ben (pseudonym), it became clear that he had invested a significant amount of time and energy in to impressing those key contextual stakeholders with whom he worked. Ben strove not only for self-affirmation but favourable recognition from significant others. The public degradation that Ben received from the club’s manager while travelling on the team coach following a game understandably left him feeling humiliated and questioning the value attached to his work, his likely future at the club, as well as his desire to continue working in the industry. The significant impact of negative public judgements, like those experienced by Ben, coaching stories shared in the work of Potrac et al. ¹⁰ and Thompson et al. ²⁷

In an effort to acquire positive regard from significant others, our participants seemingly employed a range of micro-political actions. A key strategy reported by practitioners has been their attempts to influence the perceptions of others through the practice of what Goffman termed impression management; a feature of coaching that Robyn has written about.^28–31 Importantly, our participants’ engagements in acts of impression management were not only cognitive in nature but also emotional endeavours that often required them to enact what Hochschild coined emotional labour. That is, our participants purposely sought to present emotional displays that were in accordance with the rules and ideologies of their respective workplace environments. For example, in a study of a semi-professional football coach’s emotional experiences, we noted how our participant regularly engaged in surface acting by hiding his true feelings and accompanying thoughts in an effort to control those images that he presented to a range of significant others. ⁹ Zach (pseudonym) also shared with us how he became fatigued and demotivated as a result of the prolonged management of his emotions and behaviours in the club contexts. Inauthenticity of the self seemingly took a psychological toll; a finding that has featured in many of our participants narratives.

Research into social ties and coaches’ well-being: A suggested framework

As I reflect on the lead article, those research endeavours of other researchers as well as my colleagues and I, it strikes me that the field has made some important steps in seeking to better understand how and why coaches think, feel, and act in the ways that they do. However, I believe that a more explicit investigation of those means through which coaches’ (as well as other sports workers’) social relations and interactions impact on their well-being presents a productive line of inquiry. While the physical and psychological well-being of workers in other occupations has garnered scholarly interest over more recent years, to date this remains a relatively under-researched feature of the sociology of coaching. Although research, including my own collaborative efforts, has started to point towards how social relations influence the well-being of sports workers, such findings have been interesting side notes as opposed to the principal focus of these investigations.

In responding to this call, scholars might usefully consider Peggy Thoits’s ³ theorisation of those mechanisms that she believes link social ties to health outcomes. Central to her thesis is a desire to understand and explain how the number and nature of ties in an individual’s social network influence the various forms of social support that he or she receives as well as what impact these have on their well-being. For Thoits, social ties refer to an individual’s connections to other people through membership in primary (i.e. persons with whom an individual has established emotional bonds and deems important to his or her life) and secondary groups (i.e. relationships characterised as being more formal and less personal in nature). While Thoits’s work principally focuses on understanding how social relationships positively influence mental and physical health, importantly she acknowledges that the inverse of these processes also serve to explain the ‘darker side’ of social life (p. 147). Indeed, Thoits is cognisant of the fact that ‘relationships can be tense, conflicted, or overly demanding, namely, sources of stress and strain rather than benefit’ and can often ‘cancel out the ameliorative effects of social support provisions’ (p. 147). Thoits presents seven mechanisms through which social ties influence physical and psychological well-being. Each will be considered in turn.

The first of Thoits’s mechanisms, social influence/social comparison, captures her observation that individuals often judge the appropriateness of their own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours against those standards that they observe being modelled by others in their social network. Thoits explains that ‘reference groups may model risky or preventative health behaviours, so social influence through comparison processes may have damaging or protective consequences for health, depending on the reference groups the individuals view as salient’ (p. 147). Whereas social influence/social comparison explains norms acquired without direct coercion from others, social control refers to the ‘explicit attempts of social network members to monitor, encourage, persuade, remind or pressure a person to adopt or adhere to positive health practices’ (p. 148). Despite being well intentioned and able to bring about positive health-related change, Thoits reminds us that social control can also result in harmful outcomes as attempts to discourage risk-promoting behaviours are sometimes received as being ‘overly intrusive or dominating, creating resentment and resistance to behaviour change’ (p. 148). To date, there has been limited consideration of how social influence and control exerted through networks of social relations both positively and negatively impact on the well-being of coaches and other sporting practitioners.

Thoits’s third mechanism, behavioural guidance, purpose and meaning, contends that all social ties represent role relationships that have associated reciprocal normative rights and obligations. Coach–athlete, husband–wife, parent–child, friend–friend, present just a few examples. According to Thoits’s analysis, those obligations, commitments, and responsibilities that accompany role relationships act as constraining influences prompting individuals to ‘avoid risky or deviant behaviours and to engage in self-care’, while at the same time providing them with ‘purpose and meaning in life’ (p. 148). Of course, roles are enacted with varying levels of success. An individual’s evaluation of his or her role performance, according to Thoits’s analysis, occurs not only as a result of ‘comparison with socially similar others in relevant reference groups but through imaginatively viewing our performances from the eyes of role partners and other audience members’ (p. 148). The degree to which the individual successfully enacts these roles impacts on his or her self-esteem, with higher levels of self-esteem associated with feelings of satisfaction and happiness, and anxiety and depression linked to low self-esteem.

According to Thoits’s thesis, the more frequently an individual’s efforts result in desired role-related task outcomes the greater the sense of control or mastery he or she will perceive to have over their life. This is important because ‘perceptions of control or mastery in turn sustain confidence in one’s ability to cope in the face of new challenges or major stressors and thereby should be associated with lower anxiety and depression and reduced physiological reactivity to stressors’ (p. 149). As alluded to above, studies have started to identify how the work-related performance feedback that coaches (and other sports workers) receive through their interactions with other contextual stakeholders can impact on their professional self-understanding and associated self-esteem. In seeking to build on these early insights, future inquiry might usefully investigate the interface between work and home life by exploring how coaches and other sports workers seek to manage the enactment of various work and nonworking roles, their perceived ability to respond to those various demands that accompany these role relationships, as well as what impact performance evaluations have on their sense of well-being.

Thoits suggests that connections to other persons endow a sense of belonging and companionship. The former implies acceptance by members of a social group, whereas the later refers to perceiving that there are others with whom an individual can share his or her social activities. Companionship, according to Thoits, has been shown to enhance physical and psychological well-being. In contrast, its absence has been associated with loneliness, anxiety, and depression. Thoits’s final mechanism, perceived social support, describes how networks act as conduits of emotional (‘demonstrations of love and caring, esteem and value, encouragement, and sympathy’ p. 146), informational (‘the provision of facts or advice that may help a person solve problems’ p. 146) and instrumental (‘offering or supplying behavioural or material assistance with practical tasks or problems’ p. 146) support. Consistent with the above discussion of social control, it would appear that these forms of support can be received and responded to in contrasting ways. Here, coaching scholars might usefully study how and why practitioners’ social interactions serve to promote feelings of belonging, companionship and/or loneliness, as well as how support or a failure to receive assistance from those in their social network influences the well-being of coaching practitioners.

Conclusion

In summary, I find myself in agreement with and supporting Robyn’s important and insightful observation that striving to secure acceptance in the eyes of significant others represents a key feature of coaching. While sociologically oriented inquiry has made considerable progress in terms of identifying those strategies that coaches employ in an effort to acquire positive regard from others, my argument in this commentary has been that there remains a paucity of research explicitly addressing how practitioners’ working and nonworking social networks, both positively and negatively impact on their well-being. Investigation of the later would seem important if we are to develop more effective means of preparing and supporting coaches and other sports workers.