Life Coaching Spiritual Direction and Culture | Ourmedia

I've finally got round to re adjusting my MA dissertation so that it has proper contents pages and so on. I've made it available at the address under the links that form the heading and at the bottom of this posting. But you can go straight to download here.
To help you determine whether it's of potential interest to you, here's the abstract:
"A preliminary investigation into the growth of life coaching and spiritual direction in the West. The perception that there may be similarities between them is investigated further along with the questions of whether the similarities might be significant, whether they have a cultural origin, and if they are and do, what cultural drivers might be involved. This dissertation critically investigates definitions, and outlines histories and explanations of life coaching and spiritual direction. It then looks at the alleged under-supply of Life Coaches and Spiritual Directors with an assessment of likelihoods, leads for further investigation and potential cultural drivers. It also critically explores the ways in which life coaching & spiritual direction resemble each other and the ways in which they differ. In turn, the investigation relates the similarities and differences so identified to cultural patterns and developments in the west; particularly post-modernism, spirituality, business-capitalism. It concludes that there do appear to be significant similarities between spiritual direction and life coaching and that the differences are mainly phenomenological. The similarities are both methodological and ideological and the nature and extension of the similarities makes it likely that the cultural drivers behind the rise of life coaching and the current forms of spiritual direction are to some extent shared. In addition the content of client-practitioner interactions often appears to reflect and respond to cultural trends variously labelled as late modernity or post-modernity and the concrete conditions of living in a consumerist society where individualisation has become well-embedded and where employment security can no longer be taken for granted."
Life Coaching Spiritual Direction and Culture | Ourmedia