Poststructuralism: Poststructuralist approaches to sports coaching research

This chapter provides an introductory guide to poststructuralist theory for researchers interested in conducting sport coaching research and developing pragmatic intraventions informed by a poststructuralist relational perspective. Poststructuralism marked a strong paradigmatic shift away from the main tenets and epistemological and ontological assumptions of positivism, but also of humanism/interpretivism and critical theory and their respective articulations of power, knowledge, truth, and reality. While a power relation might be fluid and mobile, it is not free in the sense that it is both regulated and produced through discourses or ways of knowing, which are perpetuated through our everyday practices. These everyday practices thus provide the limits and possibilities for understanding and practising sport coaching. These coaching and sporting discourses can be subjected or marginalised, or they can become dominant and problematically reified as universal coaching truths. To map discourses within a discursive field does not imply dividing dominant discourses from subjected ones as if discourses were fixed, permanent, and monolithic entities.