ABSTRACT
The problem is not that there aren’t definitions to be trotted out as needed but that, so far, they haven’t been pulled together into one unified, all-encompassing version. Right across the English speaking world, from the Pacific Rim via the North American continent to our own northern European offshore islands the complaints go up that:
there seems to be little agreement on what is meant by the term ‘mentor’ (Wilkin, 1992; Clutterbuck, 1991)
the concept of ‘mentoring’ remains imprecise and unclear (Harvard and Dunne, 1992) and depends on who is writing about it (Barlow, 1991)
trying to isolate exact or universally accepted definitions of mentoring is next to impossible (Stott and Walker, 1992)
where theoretical ‘models’ of mentoring exist they are partial and inadequate (Maynard and Furlong, 1993)
in mentoring research, there is little agreement on basic notions so that findings remain a crazed patchwork of separate and irreconcilable results (Jacobi, 1991)
there is a need for a more clearly defined role for mentors (Turner, 1993)—a complaint that mentors make in surveys (Powney et al, 1993; Taylor, 1994b and 1995a)
These lacks of agreement, precision, clarity and definition are hardly surprising given that even the language used about mentoring is more than a little confused-and confusing. Take ‘coaching’ for example. Some people see this as something very different from, even opposed to, ‘mentoring’ (Megginson, 1988; Parsloe, 1992). Others see it as an integral part of mentoring, something without which mentoring might not actually be ‘mentoring’ (Jacobi, 1991; Jenkins et al, 1991).
