Word from the Guest Editors Coaching & Mentoring: Between universalism, uniformity, and standardization

Coaching and mentoring are forms of developmental support that have gained considerable traction within organizations, to the point of becoming key mechanisms for managers, employees, leaders, and entrepreneurs in their development and projects (Bachkirova & Borrington, 2019). Driven by promises of change at the individual, collective, and/or organizational levels, these practices have rapidly permeated organizational discourses, imaginaries, and practices. At first glance, mentoring practices are described as “ubiquitous” (Stoeger et al., 2021, p. 6), with “impressive” figures (p. 5), while coaching is portrayed as “triumphant” (Arnaud et al., 2022, p. 16) and “firmly established” (de Haan & Nilsson, 2023, p. 641). This expansion has occurred through their diffusion across a wide range of institutional contexts—from businesses (from start-ups to global corporations) to universities and public institutions—and through their mobilization by a variety of actors: from external and internal coaches to manager/leader-coaches, as well as from informal mentoring relationships to structured mentoring programs. Their presence can be observed in many regions of the world, from Europe and North America to Asia, as well as South America and Africa. While their global diffusion seems unquestionable, the modalities of their development, their situated forms, and their differentiated effects remain largely underexplored. This special issue of Management International precisely addresses these dynamics by placing at the center of analysis the contextual dimension—institutional, cultural, geopolitical, and intercultural—of coaching and mentoring. The first article, by Paul Stokes, Ileana Monti and Marina Larios, “Mentoring Women in STEM: A Context Both Agentic and Dialogical,” presents a case study conducted in Peru as part of the evaluation of a mentoring program dedicated to women scientists. The authors show how the institutional context and the mentoring program mutually shape one another, revealing dialogical dynamics that reposition mentoring within broader relations of power, structural constraints, and spaces of agency. This attention to the situated character of mentoring is further developed in the article by Agnès Ceccarelli, Mourad Chouki, Vanessa Casadella and Sofian Tahi, “A Support Practice in the Light of Its Cultural Context: The Case of Mentoring in Rural Tunisia.” Drawing on a qualitative study within the social and solidarity economy sector, the authors highlight an idiosyncratic form of mentoring structured both by universal dimensions of this support practice and by cultural, social, and community forms specific to the studied context. Fabien Canolle’s article, “Conceptualizing Coaching as a Reflexive Space: Methodological Contributions from the Clinic of Activity,” questions dominant approaches to coaching, which are often oriented toward performance and tend to reproduce organizational models and discourses. Based on the study of a support program for doctoral students, the article conceptualizes coaching as a potential space for reflexivity—enunciative, critical, and projective. Grounded in the clinic of activity framework, this approach situates coaching within an ecological perspective attentive to ethical dimensions and power dynamics. Finally, the special issue concludes with a dialogue between François Jullien and Sybille Persson, “Support Practices in Organizations Through the Lens of Décoencidence.” This dialogue proposes a décoencident reading of the concept of support, particularly in relation to strategy, change, and the potential of situations. The authors invite readers to revisit and reconsider coaching and mentoring practices in organizations through a multidisciplinary as well as intercultural perspective, where European philosophical thought encounters perspectives drawn from the Chinese intellectual tradition. This special issue thus invites the development of a situated and contextual approach to coaching and mentoring. It calls for a more nuanced exploration of the modalities, mechanisms, and stakes of these practices as they circulate across diverse organizational, institutional, and cultural spaces, in a world where apparent uniformity often conceals essential local, relational, and …