Last week, the New York Times published an article by Ava Kaufman about Bruno Latour.
Some of the issues raised in the article are very pertinent to conversations about coaching.
This one started me off …
In a series of books in the 1970s and 1980s, Latour argued that scientific facts should be seen as a product of scientific inquiry. Facts, he said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.
Followed up by:
Facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.
I had read some of Bruno’s work in the 1980s and 1990s. Ava reminded me that “Latour began to wonder what it would look like to study scientific knowledge not as a cognitive process but as an embodied cultural practice enabled by instruments, machinery and specific historical conditions”.
I wondered how we might look at scientific coaching knowledge as “embodied cultural practice” … and how the observations we make of coaching as critical friends might stimulate conversations about what it is to coach and become a coach.
