Nikhil Sood

The power and influence of leadership trainers and executive coaches have grown exponentially since the 1990’s. In the decades since its inception, the professional-coaching industry’s original mandate of ‘skill development’ has been supplanted by a more expansive vision for coaching the desires, aspirations, and mindsets of employees into closer alignment with the goals of organizations. Increasingly, this shift in managerial priorities is coordinated by an extensive regime of personal development—one which invites ‘the whole self’ towards a horizon of self-transformation, and draws upon a diverse array of intellectual traditions, ranging from cognitive psychology and neuroscience to existential philosophy and speech-act theory. Through this dissertation research, I ethnographically trace the circulation of ideas and actors, as well as the techniques, discourses, and pedagogies, which underpin these institutional projects of self-improvement in Silicon Valley. In what ways are these heterogeneous vocabularies of mind, language, and personhood assembled into normative repertoires for self-transformation? How do these hybrid frameworks naturalize particular visions of agency, responsibility, and change, and what are the underlying social imaginaries and aspirations which animate them? And further, in what ways do these modes of self-making enable and naturalize new sets of hierarchies, or re-invigorate familiar ones?