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.     

Building a U.S.-Soviet working relationship

Conclusion The crucial determinant of U.S. and Soviet security, and the security of the world, will not depend on technological development, breakthroughs in deterrence theory, or even on agreements the two countries might sign at the summit talks. The future depends on whether the two governments are able to work together.Both the United States and the Soviet Union have developed procedures for solving conflicts with other governments, even former enemies, without hostilities or threats of force. The essential difference between these relationships and the U.S.-Soviet relationship lies not in the degree of difference in cultural heritage or security interests, but in the way the two governments approach their problems—through consultations and dispute resolution procedures, or through conflict and recrimination.The process of interaction is the essence of a working relationship. It means the difference between hostile confrontation and constructive collaboration, between fear and security, between war and peace. The summit meeting provides an opportunity to change the nature of the relationship, to change the focus of U.S.-Soviet interaction from antagonistic bargaining over divisive issues to constructive collaboration on possible solutions and working procedures. Roger Fisher is Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, 523 Pound Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.Scott Brown is Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project.     

The superpowers' dilemma

Conclusion A tit-for-tat strategy may be appropriate on substantive matters to deter exploitation by the other party. But playing tit-for-tat with the elements of the working relationship will destroy the relationship just when it is most needed to resolve substantive disputes. A more productive and stable approach would separate the substantive elements of a dispute from the procedural or relationship elements. Norms of procedural behavior, once established, should be pursued unconditionally, whether or not the other side reciprocates this behavior. Such unconditional behavior will provide a stable working relationship through which substantive disputes may be efficiently resolved. A stable relationship that provides for ready consultation will reduce the misperceptions and fears that could lead to dangerous downward spirals in substantive disputes.This two-track approach to the dilemma of U.S.-Soviet relations would play tough tit-for-tat on the substantive problems, letting the Soviets know that they cannot exploit the United States but also rewarding cooperation. On a second level, this approach would pursue unswerving, unconditional procedural norms that would encourage a stable and open working relationship. Scott Brown is Associate Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, 523 Pound Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138This work has been supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. I would like to thank my colleagues for their insight and support, particularly Roger Fisher and Bruce Allyn.This work has been supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. I would like to thank my colleagues for their insight and support, particularly Roger Fisher and Bruce Allyn.     

Compliance without enforcement: State behavior under regulatory treaties

Conclusion The common conception is that treaties are not complied with because they are unenforceable, and that the cure for this condition is treaties with teeth. Our study shows that there are good reasons why states resist formal enforcement measures in treaties and are likely to continue to do so.On the other hand, negotiation, which is the principal method for dealing with compliance problems, has had a significant measure of success. This should not surprise us. Negotiation often produces agreements between parties who are not bound to agree to anything. In the context of a set of treaty norms accepted by the parties and acknowledged as having binding force, bargaining takes place in the shadow of the law as surely as when there is a possibility of ultimate recourse to coercive sanctions.In this article, we suggest some approaches that appear to enhance the effectiveness of this process. Some have close links to general negotiating theory, such as the importance of transparency between the parties and the need for careful attention to the possibilities for non-binding third party involvement. Others are more closely related to the structural features of national and international decision-making. It remains to elaborate on these themes and integrate them with others in a comprehensive account of how and why states comply with treaties. Abram Chayes is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.Antonia Handler Chayes is a principal in Endispute Inc., 955 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Mass. 02139. Abram and Antonia Chayes are co-directors of the Project on International Compliance and Dispute Settlement, a research project based at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.     

Youth,culture, negotiation and politics

The following paper was motivated by a series of seminars held in 2004 at University of Bayreuth on the Harvard Negotiation Concept of Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton (R. Fisher, W. Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without giving in, 2nd edn, Penguin Books, New York 1991). When comparing the advices of the Harvard Negotiation Concept with my own negotiation experiences in youth politics, I realized that the Harvard Concept is rather useless in many forms of intercultural negotiations. It does not sufficiently address how much culture influences our perceptions of negotiations. Politics is not the only, but surely the most prominent field of intercultural negotiation. Therefore my focus of research was: does culture influence politics? In the first chapter, I describe the reason for the science of negotiation, the validity of universal negotiation concepts, the definition of culture and the existing research on intercultural negotiations. In the second chapter, I discuss concrete examples of how culture allegedly influences politics, such as in International Youth Politics and in the ASEM process. I also give some results from a survey that I carried out in 2004 (The extended version of the paper can be found at my webpage at http://www.karsten-wenzlaff.de). All examples cast a doubt on whether culture really influences politics.     

Fighting the wimp image: Why calls for negotiation often fall on deaf ears

Conclusion Must calls for war always dominate pleas for more serious negotiation? Not necessarily. But, if negotiation is to prevail, its advocates have to recognize which elements of their rhetoric sound weak and timid to others.Right after the routing of the Iraqis from Kuwait, the conventional wisdom was that American voters would repudiate those members of Congress who had argued for more negotiation — the surrender lobby, one belligerent called them. Iraq would teach elected officials not to talk of negotiation in the future. Now, barely a year from the start of hostilities, the verdict is not quite so clear. With Saddam still in power and the establishment of President Bush's new world order yet to be proven, opinion polls suggest that a growing number of Americans now regard the war as only a partial success. Public awareness of the costs of war, as well as its seeming benefits, can only be to the good, but apostles of negotiation should be careful not to read such numbers as vindication of their views. Skepticism about war still must be matched by some well-founded confidence in its alternative. Michael Wheeler is Director of the Undergraduate Program, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. 02139. He is also Deputy Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.     

Mediating public disputes: A response to the skeptics

Conclusions There are more than 75 well-documented cases of successful dispute resolution in the public sector (and a great many more that are less well-documented). The evidence attesting to the merits of non-adjudicatory approaches to dispute resolution is mounting rapidly.While there are some public disputes that do not lend themselves to informal resolution (i.e., disputes involving fundamental freedoms or rights), many involving conflicting interests and values have proven resolvable in a win-win fashion. The most important preconditions for success have been the presence of a credible nonpartisan facilitator or mediator, parties in an undeniably interdependent situation and pressure created by a decision maker who has promised to act (using traditional decision-making methods) in the absence of a consensus. In short, given these preconditions, there are a number of good reasons to forge ahead with efforts to employ mediation and other forms of dispute resolution on a more regular basis. Lawrence Susskind is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Executive Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138. Co-author ofResolving Environmental Regulatory Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1984), he has served as a mediator of public disputes at the local, state and federal levels.     

Teaching Interpersonal Skills for Negotation and for Life

Students enrolled in the Negotiation Workshop at Harvard Law School during the past twenty years have participated in an innovative exercise called the Interpersonal Skills Exercise (IPS). Developed through a collaboration of therapists and instructors from Harvard Law School, the exercise uses role plays, videotaping, and certain aspects of psychodrama to help students practice interpersonal skills that they have difficulty performing. The exercise allows students to work in an intensive, safe, and interactive environment with feedback from peers and course instructors. This brief note describes the IPS exercise in more detail, outlining its origins, purposes, and structure.     

The jagged line between mediation and couples therapy

Conclusion Mediation of conflict in couples has emerged as a hybrid discipline blending theory and practice from psychology, law and other disciplines. In attempting to orchestrate a successful negotiation, mediators engage the couple in problem solving over concrete issues and workable alternatives. While the healing aspirations of couples therapists transcend the narrower focus of mediation, clinical practice is enriched and informed by facilitating a negotiation that provides valuable data in an economic manner and a rich context for therapeutic intervention. Michael Meltsner is Distinguished University Professor of Law at Northeastern University Law School, 400 Huntington Ave., Boston, Mass. 02115, and a licensed marriage and family therapist.This article is based on a paper presented at the Cambridge Hospital/Harvard Medical School Conference Treating Couples and Their Families, Cambridge, Mass., 26 October 1991. I am grateful for the thoughtful comments of Barbara Hauser and the encouragement of the Couples Team of the Family Center, Somerville, Mass.     

Grievance mediation

Conclusion In sum, grievance mediation is a highly successful alternative to labor arbitration. It shares with expedited arbitration the capacity to reduce the time and cost of arbitration, and is more likely to produce mutually acceptable outcomes than is a conference procedure in which the neutral retains decisional authority. It is also more likely than either of those procedures to improve the parties' dispute resolution ability and ultimately their entire relationship.To be sure, not all grievances can be successfully resolved through mediation. Still, its advantages are so great, and its costs so low that an effort to resolve grievances at mediation should be a required step preceding arbitration in all collective bargaining contracts. Stephen B. Goldberg is Professor of Law at Northwestern University Law School, Chicago, Ill., 60611. He is a member of the National Academy of Arbitrators and president of Mediation Research and Education Project, Inc.This article draws in substantial part on material contained in the author's recent book (with William L. Ury and Jeanne M. Brett),Getting Disputes Resolved: Designing Systems to Cut the Costs of Conflict (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988).     

The Deceptive Simplicity of Teaching Negotiation: Reflections on Thirty Years of the Negotiation Workshop

What is required for effective teaching depends on the goal of the effort, and our criteria for success should be much more demanding than positive ratings from participants. If the goal is to improve participants' effectiveness as negotiators, we need a proven theory and associated skills. In the absence of robust confirming empirical data, which is still mostly lacking, we can take some confidence from qualitative evaluations. But whether or not we have a proven theory, the pedagogical task is complex and challenging, calling for a variety of sophisticated techniques deployed by a skilled instructor committed to joint learning. This article tells the story of some of the instructors' pedagogical learnings in thirty years of teaching the pioneering Negotiation Workshop at Harvard Law School, many of which now have empirical support. It also suggests some areas and tools for more experimentation in future advanced courses.     

Frameworks for Arab-Israeli Negotiations–What Difference Do They Make?

Conclusion It is unfortunate that procedural controversies about the appropriate forum for negotiations often delay substantive talks on how to accommodate conflicting interests. But historical experience indicates that the participants believe the forum to be important. If and when a decision to renew negotiations is reached, the choice of the forum and the shaping of its structure will not be determined by its effectiveness as a vehicle for conflict resolution, but by the political calculus of bargaining power, and side effects, that such a forum would entail.International negotiations are aimed at conflict resolution. But they cannot be divorced from competitive power politics. The disputes about fora for negotiations are not about choosing an effective structure for making peace, but about seizing the high ground for the diplomatic battles ahead. Saadia Touval is Professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University in Israel. During the 1986–87 academic year, he is Visiting Professor of Political Science at Brown University in Providence, R.I. and Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Centers for International Affairs and for Middle Eastern Studies. His recent publications includeThe Peace Brokers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, and (with I.W. Zartman),International Mediation in Theory and Practice (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985).An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Middle East Seminar of the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in March 1986. The support of the Center in preparing this article for publication is gratefully acknowledged.     

New models of negotiation,dispute resolution,and joint problem solving

The revolutionary changes sweeping the workplace, union-management relationships, and the world economy have contributed to a sharply redefined role for the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), the primary provider of mediation services to labor and management in the United States. In this article's three main sections, the authors trace the history and provide background information about FMCS; consider the changing role of mediation, driven by societal forces of change from the late 1970s to the present; and speculate on the agency's future and the expected expansion in the use of mediation. John Calhoun Wells has served as Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service since November, 1993, when he was appointed to that position by President Bill Clinton.Wilma B. Liebman is Deputy Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.     

Measuring both the art and science of mediation

Conclusion An art is best observed, and the effort to specify the criteria for watching art is a worthy enterprise. Like all art criticism, however, it is not clear to me that we will always have convergence in our evaluations. If theInterim Guidelines are tested in more settings (and subjected to test validation studies) we will learn more about whether it is possible to create a science of evaluation in this field.With all my reservations, I still applaud the effort to create standards for evaluation, based on actual performance of the task. I hope there will be further opportunity to test and refine these performance standards so that they may be used in a professionally responsible way to facilitate good screening, training, and evaluation of mediators in a wide variety of settings. Carrie Menkel-Meadow is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, 405 Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, Calif. 90024-1476.     

Book reviews

William C. Green and Theodore Karasik (Eds.), Gorbachev and his Generals: The Reform of Soviet Military Doctrine (Westview Press, 1990, 239pp. ISBN 0–8133–7898–2)

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, On the Law of Nations (Harvard University Press, 1990)

Peter J. Stavrakis, Moscow and Greek Communism, 1944–1949. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London. 1989. ISBN 0–8014–2125–X.

Scalpino, R.A., The Politics of Development: Perspectives on Twentieth‐Century Asia (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, pp.131)

Sean M. Lynn‐Jones, Steven E. Miller and Stephen van Evera (Eds.), Soviet Military Policy (MIT Press, 1989. £26.95 [cloth]; £13.50 [paperback]).     

When ADR becomes the law: A review of federal practice

Conclusion With the passage of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act, the stage was set for innovation and change in federal agencies. Now, part way into the five-year life of the Act, a new administration has the potential to encourage even wider use of ADR at the federal level, providing still more examples from which to develop a clearer sense of best practice. Additional funds, both for ACUS and individual agencies, are vital to providing the level of experimentation, innovation, and documentation needed to ensure success.MIT ProfessorLawrence E. Susskind is director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, 512 Pound Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.Eileen F. Babbitt is associate director of the Public Disputes Program.Phyllis N. Segal is a practicing mediator with Endispute, Incorporated.The authors would like to acknowledge the federal dispute resolution specialists who contributed greatly to our work by providing interviews and materials for this article: Cathy Costantino of FDIC; David Batson of EPA; John Settle and Ron Walczak of HHS; David Drabkin of DLA; Jim Jones of DOL; Sheldon Guttman of FCC; Charles Pou of ACUS; Jeff Domber of GSA; and Diane Liff of DOT.     

Peace and community building in Northeast Asia

This topic involves some difficulties, one of which is about the concept of “Northeast Asia”. Broadly speaking, Northeast Asia should include China, Japan, Korean Peninsula, Russia’s Far East, and Mongolia. It is obviously not possible to address complex issues in such a broad region within several pages. Therefore, this paper shall focus on the main part of Northeast Asia, i.e., China, Japan, and Korea.

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Teaching Negotiation Using Web-Based Streaming Video

This brief essay describes the author's experiences using web-based, streaming video technology in the Spring 2002 Legal Negotiation workshop at the University of Colorado's School of Law. He first describes the practical and pedagogical problems with traditional videotaping approaches that led him to consider streaming video. He then explains the project, how it was implemented, and its pedagogical costs and benefits. He also presents the results of a short survey of students indicating how useful the students found this feedback format. Appendix One describes the technical aspects of the project, including startup costs and the software and hardware used.     

New Books

Books reviewed in this article:
Avenhaus, Rudolph, Victor A. Kremenyuk, and Gunnar Sjöstedt , editors. Containing the Atom: International Negotiations on Nuclear Security and Safety .
Blackshaw, Ian S . Mediating Sports Disputes: National and International Perspectives .
Blaker, Michael, Paul Giarra, and Ezra Vogel . Case Studies in Japanese Negotiating Behavior .
Gilboa, Eytan , editor. Media and Conflict: Framing Issues, Making Policy, Shaping Opinions .
Irving, Howard H. and Michael Benjamin . Therapeutic Family Mediation: Helping Families Resolve Conflict .
Kriesberg, Louis . Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution .
LeBaron, Michelle . Bridging Troubled Waters: Conflict Resolution from the Heart .
Raiffa, Howard, with John Richardson and David Metcalfe . Negotiation Analysis: The Science and Art of Collaborative Decision Making .
Smyser, W.R. How Germans Negotiate .
Voorhees, James . Dialogue Sustained: The Multilevel Peace Process and the Dartmouth Conference .