The Reporter's Dilemma: News Gathering as Negotiation

This article presents a framework for understanding the process of news gathering as a negotiation between reporters and the people and institutions they cover. News gathering is shaped by constant tension between the deal - getting the story - and the relationship among those concerned. Competing actors and multiple levels exacerbate the reporter's dilemma, a variant of the classic negotiator's dilemma. Using case material from published accounts of news gathering, this article points to practical implications for all involved parties in negotiating with the media.     

The Rhythm of the Deal: Negotiation as a Dance

In all the literature on the theory and practice of negotiation, the governing metaphors have been games, war, and fighting. This is true not only for tactical schools of power‐based negotiation but even for more constructive, interest‐based approaches. Our language is infused with talk of tactics, flanks, concessions, gaining ground, and winning. This article explores the possible consequences of abandoning this picture in favor of the less‐explored metaphor of the dance. We argue that both the content and the process of negotiation can change dramatically once we think of bargaining as an aesthetic activity that can provide intrinsic joy as well as extrinsic benefits. Such a “dance” provides plenty of room for competition as well as cooperation, as movements can be spirited and confrontational as well as smooth and harmonious. We identify many forms of dance that can occur within negotiation and explore three: the dance of positioning, where passions and presentations interact proudly; the dance of empathy, when the partners come to better understand each other; and the dance of concessions, where the deal is struck and the music concludes. Finally, we discuss how the dance can be employed pedagogically, in teaching and training negotiation and mediation. In particular, the Brazilian dance of capoeira illustrates holistically and experientially how movement and rhythm can be interpreted both as fighting and as dancing and how we can come to see a process as both aesthetic and purposeful at the same time. First feeling, then thinking, and, finally, speaking, we can use this medium to explore the dynamics of confrontation and cooperation in a negotiation setting.     

Groups,Decision Rules,and Negotiation Outcomes: Simulating the Negotiator's Dilemma

The negotiator's dilemma is a vexing problem (structurally similar to the prisoner's dilemma), but it is made more complicated by the fact that many negotiations involve teams of negotiators. Although it is widely recognized that the behavior of groups of people can deviate in important ways from the behavior of individuals, the implications of this for the negotiator's dilemma are unclear. For this article, I have used a computer simulation to explore the impact of different decision rules (majority rule, consensus, and weakest link) on how the approach of groups to negotiations might differ. The results suggest that the use of different decision rules can greatly complicate negotiations. While the majority rule is quite versatile in multiple contexts, a pairing of weakest link and consensus decision rules is highly problematic for finding a negotiated settlement.     

Negotiation: The Chinese Concept

It is no understatement to say that negotiation activity has skyrocketed in China in recent years; however, these negotiations are frequently unsatisfactory. Part of the reason for this lack of success is that Chinese people have a conception of negotiation that is fundamentally different from that of people in the West. Based on extensive interviews with Chinese and non-Chinese negotiators over a period of five years, the author explains the Chinese approach by using two metaphors: mobile warfare and the joint quest. Understanding this approach has significant implications for negotiation practice.     

Bargaining Styles and Negotiation: The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument in Negotiation Training

Many negotiation courses and executive training programs cover the subject of bargaining styles. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) is a commonly used psychological assessment tool that helps students and teachers probe this topic. The TKI measures the five conflict management facets proposed by the Dual Concerns Model: competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating, and avoiding. The author has used the TKI extensively in teaching executives about bargaining styles, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of it as a teaching aid. He also presents research on the frequency with which various TKI scores are reported in business programs. Finally, he provides thumbnail sketches of typical bargaining behavior exhibited by people with very strong and very weak predispositions for each of the five conflict modes. Some implications of these behaviors for specific professional audiences are explored.     

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.     

The Mass Media as Sentinel: Why Bad News About Issues is Good News for Participation

This article argues that negative news coverage of politically relevant social issues stimulates political participation by shaping citizen awareness of collective problems and interest in politics. By drawing citizen attention to social problems that government may attend to, the press acts as a sentinel for the mass public, cuing them to periods when participation is more important. Drawing on an analysis of the 1974 National Election Study in combination with the Center for Political Studies' content analysis of newspapers, I find evidence that bad news about issues is good news for participation.     

Hypothetical Questions as Strategic Devices in Negotiation

In this article, we analyze the use of hypothetical questions in integrative negotiation. We argue that hypothetical questions are useful devices for advancing implicit proposals and can also provide strategic argumentative support for the acceptance of a particular solution. To explain why negotiators prefer to use hypothetical questions when putting forward implicit proposals and to demonstrate how these questions fulfill negotiators' argumentative purposes, our study uses the pragma‐dialectical concept of strategic maneuvering and applies it to the analysis of a number of real‐life negotiations. We conclude by demonstrating that hypothetical questions can be effective devices for strategic maneuvering and that negotiators can employ these kinds of questions to resolve some of the rhetorical predicaments imposed by the negotiator's dilemma as well as to gain a competitive edge over their counterparts.     

Role Effects in Negotiation: The One-Down Phenomenon

Role is a concept that underlies most studies of human behavior in negotiation as subjects take on the roles of buyers and sellers or labor and management contract bargainers, for example Naturalistic studies also focus on such roles as teacher and administrator contract bargainers, hostage takers and hostage negotiators, Palestinian and Israeli peace negotiators, and husbands and wives in divorce mediations. This article examines these role effects and finds consistent patterns across both experimental and naturalistic contexts. Specifically, a "one-down effect" emerges when individuals in lower power roles assume more aggressive negotiation strategies that are significantly less effective in achieving desired outcomes. The article concludes by identifying the theoretical frameworks that might explain these role differences.     

Using Blogs as a Teaching Tool in Negotiation

This article reports on the experimental use of blogs as a teaching tool in a course on negotiation and mediation. The blogs were of two kinds: individual "journal" blogs accessible only by the student author and the course instructor, and a class or collective blog, accessible by all members of the course. The use of blogs builds on the familiar use of journals as a tool for reflection and personal review and adopts the technology of online communication with which the student body is increasingly familiar and comfortable. The article reports on the student response to this development and the perceived impact on extended peer-to-peer communication, cooperation, and skills development. This note also briefly places this experiment in the wider context of the widespread use of blogging, online social networking, and — more ambitiously — the promotion of critical and deliberative skills through the use of information communications technology.     

The Security Dilemma: A Conceptual Analysis

Critically building upon the work of Herbert Butterfield, John Herz, and Robert Jervis, this article advances a more rigorous definition of the security dilemma. It demonstrates critical implications of the rigorously redefined concept. It examines several influential extensions and expansions of the original concept, showing that most have been inaccurate and misleading, and proposes remedies for correcting the mistakes. Finally, it identifies several areas of future research that may yield important new insights into the dynamics of the security dilemma.     

The Effectiveness of Negotiation Training

In the last twenty-five years negotiation has become widely recognized both as a topic of serious research and as an essential, frequently used set of skills. Organizations currently spend tens of billions of dollars annually on training, and mounting evidence suggests that training in interpersonal and problem-solving domains typically has a significantly positive effect. But little systematic research has been conducted concerning the actual effectiveness of negotiation training. This article reviews the available evidence regarding the effectiveness of negotiation training using four levels of outcome measurement. While far less prevalent than one would wish, existing evidence suggests that negotiation training can have positive effects. In this article, I review the specific effects of different teaching methods, and recommend additional research.