Negotiation,politics, and management

Book reviews in this article:
Samuel B. Bacharach and Edward J. Lawler , Power and Politics in Organizations: The Social Psychology of Conflict, Coalitions, and Bargaining .
Max H. Bazerman and Roy J. Lewicki , eds., Negotiating in Organizations .
Jeffrey Pfeffer , Power in Organizations .     

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.     

Violence,politics and the state in Bangladesh

The politics and ideology of South Asia has been characterised by violence for a considerable time. Bangladesh is no exception, where violence is both widespread and multifaceted. It arises for political, economic, and socio-cultural reasons and is evidenced not only in the incidence of violence but also in the availability of small arms, in the evident political ties with violent organisations and criminal activities, in the prevalence of corruption and the effect which all this has on the forces of law and order. This poses enormous challenges for the state which urgently needs to introduce measures of reform in the judicial and police administration system. De-linking politics from the activities of criminals and terrorists is an important first step toward this goal.     

Control,soft information,and the politics of international organizations staffing

This article offers insights into the aggregate patterns of the geographical distribution of professional staff in some of the major international organizations (IOs). Building on the principal-agent framework, I argue that powerful member states seek dominant positions in IOs’ secretariats, in an effort to increase their ability to control them. At the same time, it is often the weakest low-income countries that are the IOs’ primary clients. Over-representation of the most powerful states is likely to lead to functional and legitimation problems for the IOs, in particular with regard to the IOs’ lack of access to ‘soft’ information about the countries in which they operate. Using a newly created dataset covering 19 major bodies of the United Nations family, I identify two aggregate patterns in the geographical distribution of their professional staff. First, the most powerful states dominate IOs’ secretariats. Second, however, many IOs systematically deviate in their staffing practices from this overall pattern, as well as from the existing rules that formalize it, and relatively over-represent also low-income countries. What results is a curvilinear (U-shaped) pattern where both powerful and very poor states are over-represented in many IOs’ professional staff.     

Poverty elimination,North-South research collaboration,and the politics of participatory development

This paper reflects critically on issues of North-South collaboration and participatory research arising from a project on participatory and sustainable local-level environmental management in the peri-urban area surrounding Kumasi, Ghana. Rapid immigration, uncoordinated conversion of farmland to housing, intensified resource exploitation, and declining water quality and availability are particularly pressing problems there. Collaborative research arrangements with local partners as well as sustained participatory relations with selected village communities were central to this project. More generally, the paper reflects on institutional issues relating to the dichotomy between research and development assistance projects, and their implications for project evaluations.     

Political entrepreneurs,clientelism, and civil society: supply-side politics in Turkey

How do citizens in developing democracies launch political careers? Despite the large literature on electoral politics in developing countries, we know surprisingly little about how individuals become political candidates. This article examines an important mechanism of political recruitment in developing democracies: party-civil society organization (CSO) linkages. Existing theories treat CSOs as arenas of civic participation rather than as political agents in their own right, which leads scholars to overlook their impact on electoral competition. This article argues that the distinct resource portfolios of CSOs influence their relative impact on candidate selection, and consequently, local politics. CSOs that represent the material interests of their constituents, such as resource-rich business groups and vote-rich identity groups, have significant influence over candidate selection. Issue-oriented CSOs tend to have less impact. Party-CSO relations often facilitate clientelist linkages between parties and voters, weakening democratic governance. Evidence is provided with an in-depth case study of CSO-political party relations in the industrial periphery of Istanbul, Turkey.     

Psychopathology and world politics

The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can be considered firstly from the world politics perspective. This means examining the dysfunctional forms of human behaviour manifest there—both individual and collective/communal. It means examining how such behaviour can be described and explained in psychiatric or psychological/psychoanalytical terms. The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can also be considered from the psychopathology perspective. This means examining some of the key psychopathological concepts that are of relevance to world affairs. It means examining paranoia or narcissism, for example, and the way understanding syndromes like these helps further our understanding of world affairs.