Coaching for the nation: A new ‘moral and ethical assemblage’ for Israel’s last republican generation

Since the early 2000s, coaching has enjoyed great popularity in Israel, both in the workplace and in the sphere of personal life. A myriad of for-profit institutes and higher-learning institutions offer coaching training programs and thousands of Israelis have become certified coaches. A growing body of literature in the social sciences has been preoccupied with the construction of subjectivity under neoliberalism. Inspired by the Foucauldian tradition, these studies analyze neoliberalism as a form of governmental reason that aims to ‘conduct the conduct’ of free subjects. In a programmatic text on the emergence of global assemblages, Ong and Collier argue that ‘neoliberalism’s actual shape and significance for the forms of individual and collective life can only be understood as it enters into assemblages with other elements’. The chapter shows how such an assemblage is being constructed in the new field of Israeli coaching.