Culture and Negotiation Strategy

In this article the authors investigate the relationship between culture and joint gains by examining the role of information sharing and power strategies in intracultural negotiations. Previously, the authors found that the relationship between cultural values or norms and joint gains was uncertain in six cultures: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the United States. Of the five values and norms measured, only norms for information sharing in negotiation were directly related to joint gains. This article explores and extends prior findings by investigating the strategies used by negotiators in the same six cultures. Cultures that maximized joint gains used direct information-sharing strategies or a combination of indirect and direct strategies. Power strategies may help or hurt joint gains, depending on a culture's values and norms for power and whether or not power-based influence is used in conjunction with sufficient information exchange. The findings suggest that understanding the other party's cultural characteristics and strategies can help negotiators plan how to focus on information exchange and deal with unusual power strategies that they may encounter.     

The Beauty Premium: Physical Attractiveness and Gender in Dictator Games

Are beautiful people better negotiators? In this article, I present evidence from a simple bargaining game in which players listened to prerecorded speeches and viewed the pictures of other players. I found that physically attractive players received a greater share of the surplus when their partners could both listen to their speeches and view their pictures. This effect was strongest when the listening partner was female. These results suggest new directions for experimental and empirical research on the role of nonresumé characteristics on labor market outcomes, and also has implications for those practitioners involved in negotiations characterized by extreme power imbalances between the parties.     

Culture and Negotiation: The Pedagogical Dispute Regarding Cross-Cultural Simulations

This article examines one especially challenging aspect of active-learning international studies courses—the use of cross-cultural simulations. What is the significance of culture for negotiation? What difficulties might cross-cultural negotiations pose, and how might negotiators work with cultural differences to achieve successful outcomes? Is it possible to model the effects of cultures on negotiators in a classroom role-play? What are the advantages to using cross-cultural simulations, and what difficulties do they entail? How might an instructor make best use of materials that focus on cultural issues and their effect on negotiation? When teaching students of different cultures by active-learning methods, what ought an instructor to bear in mind? What cross-cultural simulations are available, and what readings might be assigned to accompany them?     

Reflections on the history of Japanese diplomacy

Japan and the Wider World: From the Mid‐Nineteenth Century to the Present, Akira Iriye. London: Longman. 1997. viii, 213pp. ISBN: 0–582–21053–4

The Clash: U.S.‐Japanese Relations Throughout History, Walter LaFeber. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1997. xxii, 508pp. ISBN: 0–393–03950–1

Hands Across the Sea?: U.S.‐Japan Relations, 1961–1981, Timothy P. Maga. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 1997. x, 183pp. ISBN: 0–8214–1210–8     

Negotiating Umbrella Agreements

Experienced negotiators know that it is often impossible to define all terms of a complex agreement. By negotiating umbrella agreements, the negotiating parties try to balance the need for certainty and calculability of give-and-take processes with the need to remain sufficiently flexible to embrace new or emerging business opportunities. Umbrella agreements describe a joint consent that explicitly articulates a framework of rules and principles that guides future agreements. It is argued that negotiators are better able to maximize their joint gains if they differentiate between agreements and the framework in which agreements are made.     

The Limited Test–Ban Agreement: Emergence of New Knowledge Structures in International Negotiation

An analysis of cognitive maps constructed from exchanges between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev on the test–ban issue suggests cultural differences in the basic knowledge structures used to represent political reality. Soviet negotiators, including Premier Khrushchev, use"processual"representations, while U.S. negotiators, including President Kennedy, use"procedural"representations. A comparison of the negotiations over time reveals the emergence of new knowledge structures that were hypothesized to facilitate an agreement on nuclear testing. A related discovery, that Kennedy and Khrushchev"translate"each other from procedural to processual and vice versa, provides additional evidence for the shared reality–building process that may be a precondition for successful negotiation.     

“The past,present, and the perhaps’ is Germany a “normal” power?

Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999).

Thomas U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

John S. Duffield, World Power Forsaken. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Christian Hacke, Die Aussenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Weltmacht wider Willen? 3rd ed. (Berlin: Ullstein, 1997).

Peter Katzenstein, ed., Tamed Power: Germany in Europe. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Elizabeth Pond, The Rebirth of Europe. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1999).

James Sperling, “Neither Hegemony nor Dominance: Reconsidering German Power in Post‐Cold War Europe,” British Journal of Political Science (forthcoming).     

Stemming the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa: Are our HIV/AIDS campaigns failing us?

Abstract

Media-based campaigns are critical tools in changing the behaviours that are fuelling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa. However, given the absence of an effective behaviour-change response in the face of the epidemic, many have come to doubt the efficacy of these campaigns. Campaign designers who profess to using best-practice principles in designing HIV/AIDS campaigns also report that although some of these campaigns book changes in beliefs and attitudes, they seldom have a significant effect on the behaviours that are fuelling the epidemic.

This situation raises a number of general questions with regard to South African HIV/AIDS campaigns: How effective are media-based campaigns in general in changing health-related behaviours? Are South African HIV/AIDS campaigns successful or not? If not, why not, what could be done to optimise their efficacy? What aspects of South African HIV/AIDS campaigns contribute to their efficacy and could be up-scaled in future campaigns?

This article provides a critical analysis of the processes followed in the design of the Living Positively Campaign and of the design features of the messaging of the booklet Living positively with HIV and AIDS. This analysis clearly indicates that despite claims by campaign designers of adherence to best-practice heuristics, very few of them are implemented in the design of HIV/AIDS campaigns.     

United States Hegemony and the New Economics of Defense

Liberal theory asserts that the need for cost-effective, technologically advanced weapons requires the United States to acquiesce to increasing defense globalization even as this restrains U.S. power. Realist logic dictates that the United States should resist defense liberalization to retain its self-sufficiency. This is a false choice; the United States encourages defense globalization in order to extend its international political influence. This paper proposes an alternate theory of technological hegemony that explains the U.S. policy of massive R&D investment in both the late Cold War and the current era of American preponderance. Modern weapons' complexity and economies of scale tend to produce monopolies, and the value chain for the production of these monopolistic goods is dominated by the systems integration techniques of prime contracting firms. In turn these prime contractors remain largely enthralled by U.S. market power. The United States gains international influence by controlling the distribution of these weapons. Put simply, technology with international political effects is likely to have international political origins.     

Building Momentum in Negotiations: Time-Related Costs and Action-Forcing Events

Using the negotiations over the future of Northern Ireland and other case examples, the author develops a conceptual framework for analyzing how negotiators seek to build momentum and overcome stalemate. The framework focuses on the choices negotiators face between taking action and waiting in the hope that counterparts will make concessions, exploring the importance of perceptions of time-related costs and action-forcing events in shaping decision making. The framework highlights the uneven, nonlinear nature of the flow of negotiation processes from initiation to agreement or breakdown, and focuses on the ways negotiators seek to influence the flow by shaping perceptions of time-related costs, structuring action-forcing events, and creating linkages among sets of negotiations.     

The tension between empathy and assertiveness

This article explores two central dimensions of negotiation behavior: empathy and assertiveness. Empathy refers to the process by which negotiators demonstrate an understanding of their counterpart. Assertiveness refers to the process by which a negotiator articulates and advocates her interests. Although many people experience empathy to be incompatible with assertion and vice-versa, the authors suggest that the most effective negotiators develop expertise along both dimensions. Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Chair of the Steering Committee of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and Director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project. Scott R. Peppet is a Lecturer on Law and Graduate Fellow in Law and Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Andrew S. Tulumello is a law clerk to Judge Pamela Ann Rymer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. This article is part of an ongoing negotiation project focusing on the roles lawyers play in negotiation.     

Impact of human rights on U.S. foreign assistance to Latin America

Building upon the contributions of previous studies of U.S. foreign aid, this study examines the relationship between human rights and U.S. foreign assistance. Concentrating on the years 1979–1985, the impact of human rights conditions on both economic and military aid allocations to Latin America is analyzed. The results of this analysis indicate that though other factors have a significant effect upon aid allocation, human rights are an important factor in determining the allocation of both U.S. economic assistance and U.S. military assistance. The findings suggest that those countries with better human rights conditions are likely to receive more U.S. aid than others.     

Negotiators as Mediators: The Case of 1987–1995 Korea–United States Bilateral Trade Negotiations

Despite their widely recognized benefits, integrative approaches to negotiation have seldom been effectively used in interorganizational negotiations. This study analyzes the 1987–1995 Korea–United States Trade Negotiations, identifying elements in those talks that could have moved the negotiations in a more integrative direction. The role of building relationships — especially between key negotiators — is examined. Informal negotiations between the key negotiators from both sides were crucial in building such relationships, which helped both sides create solutions for mutual gains. This process was realized, inter alia, by the dual role that the key negotiators took on as negotiators and as mediators.     

The political use of victims: The shaping of the challenger disaster

This essay applies Kenneth Burke's concept of victimage to analyze Ronald Reagan's handling of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. The deaths of the Challenger seven could have served as powerful symbols of failed policy and flawed leadership. Yet Reagan reconciled the failure of the shuttle and renewed U.S. commitment to the space program by sanctifying the crew and offering Americans consolation and purgation through sacrifice of the seven in victimage.

Through interpretive textual analysis, the essay makes clear the process by which Reagan enacted the drama. Implications are drawn for the U.S. space program and for understanding the political use of victimage.

The essay suggests that political victimage now must be a reflexive process, enacted after the death, after the fact. Often in our times, ordinary people are slaughtered by forces as random as they are terrible. In order for the drama to give meaning and purpose to their passing, victims must be transformed in and by the drama. Purified and perfected, victims are sanctified and sacrificed after the fact in the dramas created about them.     

Chautauqua: Are media news spectacles perverting our political processes?

“Chautauqua: Are media news spectacles perverting our political processes?” Communication Monographs, 59 (1992), 395–420.     

Does Proximity Encourage Tolerance and Less State-Centrism?: Dismissing Monolithic Chinese Youth Perception of Terrorism and Security in a Comparative Regional Study

After 9/11, the exact perception among young Chinese of terrorism and security is little known to the world. What are their views and how are they formed? Are there any obvious differences in perception between young Chinese in different parts of China? What causes this disparity, if there is any? Are these differences intentionally created by the Chinese party-state top-down, or are they only nurtured in a bottom-up, decentralized manner? Using primary research findings obtained from original quantitative surveys and qualitative analyses, this article attempts to offer an empirical answer to these questions. The article is arranged in three sections. The first provides a review of the literature on the topic and describes the research methodology used. The second offers an analysis of our survey findings on how university students from two different cities, Shanghai and Xi'an, evolve distinctive perceptions about terrorism and security. The third section explains the framework used to analyse our findings, which can be summarized as “the nearer, the more tolerant and the less state-centric” towards terrorist-related topics. A conclusion suggests the possible roles of—and wake-up calls for—the Chinese state and the media in light of these disparate perceptions.     

The impact of international conflict and detente on bargaining in arms control negotiations: An experimental analysis

This paper reports on a laboratory experiment which investigated the impact of conflict and cooperation in a hypothetical international environment on the bargaining processes and outcomes of a simulated arms control negotiation. A method called Bargaining Process Analysis was employed for measuring the content of bargaining behaviors in this experiment where free verbal interactions were permitted.

The results suggested that a heightening of international tensions tended to increase the perceptions of mutual hostility among negotiators, to increase the employment of “hard‐line” bargaining strategies such as threats and retractions, to increase the proportion of negative relative to positive affect and disagreements relative to agreements. These changes in bargaining behavior, in turn, detracted from the ability of negotiators to identify a solution to the bargaining problem and from the level of agreement attained. Conversely, increased cooperation in the international environment had no consistent, strong effects on either the bargaining process or outcomes of negotiations.     

Grief reactions and effective negotiation

Conclusion In the event of death, society has in place a wide range of rituals and supports designed to help mourners deal with their grief. It may be that assigning blame and seeking legal recourse has become a significant ritual for those who have sustained other types of losses and, in some situations, loss through death as well. However, unlike societal death rituals, which guide the mourners, no guidelines exist to help negotiators address the impact of grief on their clients. Thus, in this article, insights gleaned from studies of grief, loss, and separation have been examined in an effort to develop an awareness of the impact of grief reactions on the parties to negotiation.Grief reactions—ranging from denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and guilt to acceptance—serve a useful purpose for those who have sustained grievous losses. Consequently, a better understanding of grief factors may be advantageous to negotiators and, more importantly, to their clients. Such considerations may help challenge perceptions of other parties that may otherwise be prejudicial to one's client (as in the Lindy Chamberlain case) and assist negotiators in trying to anticipate, and thus protect their clients from, grief-related reactions of other parties. In the large number of cases where negotiation and settlement discussions are not only critical but also decisive, grief theory may provide negotiators with better insight into client, and other party, interests and may help them to formulate advice and intervention strategies that take the impact of various grief reactions into account. Nancy Lewis Buck is an attorney and social worker, currently completing a doctoral dissertation at Yale Law School. Her mailing address is 9 Surrey St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.