No Sheriff in Town: Governance for Online Dispute Resolution

Online dispute resolution (ODR), the practice of resolving disputes via the Internet or digital applications, has been developing since the mid‐1990s. As the field has grown and gained traction, it has increasingly received attention from professional associations and industry leaders in the world of alternative dispute resolution (ADR). More recently, it has begun to receive recognition from sources outside of this field — in both the public and private sectors. As the field develops and individual initiatives become widely adopted, the attention it receives from external sources will undoubtedly focus on questions of quality, ethics, practitioner training, service provider qualifications, and monitoring. These questions — already beginning to be heard from within the field — derive, in essence, from one shared overall question, that of appropriate governance for the ODR field. In this article, we will explain what we mean when we discuss a field's governance and suggest that the field itself should investigate issues of its own governance. We explore and explain the current “low‐to‐no” state of governance in ODR — and the developments that are likely, should the field fail to actively address this issue. We discuss the costs of no governance, and the potential costs and disadvantages of employing a higher‐governance model. We ask whether ODR can, indeed, be governed at all, and illustrate why addressing ODR governance is a very complex venture, in terms of the web of factors to be addressed, no matter how beneficial internal governance may be. We do not, in this article, intend to decide any of these questions — but, rather, to pose them to the ODR field and to the wider fields of ADR and conflict management. We point out why the ODR field is at a developmental point that is highly suitable for discussing and deciding these questions — and why these decisions might have far‐reaching implications for a wide range of conflict‐related fields.     

Twenty-Five Years Ago and Twenty-Five Years from Now: The Future of Public Dispute Resolution

Over the past twenty-five years, public dispute resolution has emerged as an important area of practice — linked, in part, to ongoing efforts to promote deliberative democracy. As the field has evolved, however, the market for public dispute mediators has shifted. It is already possible to glimpse the further shifts and the new intellectual challenges likely to face the public dispute resolution field over the next twenty-five years.     

Using Blogs in Teaching Negotiation: A Technical and Intercultural Postscript

This article reexamines an earlier experiment in the use of blogs in teaching negotiation when undertaken in a different cultural environment. I briefly examine two core factors — technical competence and cultural preferences in communication — as well as a student preference to reserve the use of social media for purely social and informal communications. Parallels are also drawn with the technical and cultural contexts of developments in online dispute resolution.     

Mediation Ethics: A Grounded Approach

Using insights drawn from mediation practice, social justice scholarship, and debates on ethical thinking in other professional fields, the authors argue that prevailing ethical codes for mediators in the United States stunt the development of ethical thinking in the field. Current codes and even their critiques take a "top-down" approach that proceeds from the perspective of the mediator and gives primacy to abstract principles rather than to the particulars and contexts of disputes. This approach ignores a much richer practice on the ground, depends on an artificial division of procedural and substantive justice, and constricts the scope of ethical questions raised, inhibiting effective systemic solutions. The authors argue for ethics grounded in the context of particular substantive areas, which do not focus on the mediator alone and which remain open to a wider set of social justice considerations.     

Ways of Handling Conflict: What We Have Learned, What Problems Remain

This article canvasses the principal achievements of the past twenty-five years in alternative dispute resolution and addresses some of the current challenges and how they might be addressed.     

Cultivating Dialogue: From Fragmentation to Relationality in Conflict Interaction

This article builds on the tendency in recent decades in the field of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) to analyze conflict and its transformation from a relational perspective. It surveys developments in twentieth‐century philosophy that support the ongoing quest to explore the self in ADR from a relational perspective. It then shows how the concept of dialogue provides a framework for understanding conflict transformation from a relational perspective, by exploring the relational foundations of dialogue. It also draws a connection between the growing use of mindfulness practices in conflict settings and the practice of dialogue, suggesting that Buddhist philosophy and practices can help cultivate relational awareness and dialogue. The article therefore suggests that incorporating dialogue and exploring its relational characteristics can assist ADR scholars and practitioners to develop further practices that can promote collaboration by shifting disputants from adversarial and fragmented orientations to more relational mindsets.     

What Dispute Systems Design Can Learn from Project Management

The discipline of project management (PM), a well‐recognized management approach to large‐scale, high‐cost projects, has much to offer the field of dispute systems design (DSD). This article explores the core concepts of each discipline, noting similarities and differences, with a particular focus on stakeholder management, scope management, risk management, and quality management. Two case studies, General Electric's early dispute resolution program and Chevron's corporate social responsibility initiative in the Niger Delta, demonstrate the application of project management priciples in two DSD scenarios: one with internal corporate stakeholders and one with external community stakeholders. The authors identify five key lessons that dispute systems design can draw from project management and identify areas for further study.     

The Next Step: Research on How Dispute System Design Affects Function

Despite claims that ADR offers "better" solutions than traditional approaches (such as the courts), the field of dispute resolution has trouble proving its case. The reason is that we lack baseline data on the effectiveness of both traditional and nontraditional dispute resolution methods. Practitioners and researchers of dispute resolution should work together and in collaboration with public and private sector institutions to incorporate systemized data collection and evaluation into ADR practice. The growing subfield of dispute system design offers particularly rich ground for such collaboration between the research and practice communities.     

Insight Mediation: A Learning-Centered Mediation Model

Insight mediation is the name we have given to the model of mediation that is taught and practiced at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. The name has evolved from our efforts to situate the model in relation to the transformative and narrative styles of mediation. Drawing upon the work of Canadian philosopher Bernard Lonergan and his theory of insight, mediators practicing this model seek direct and inverse insights into what the conflict means to each party by discovering what each party cares about and how that threatens the other party. Insights shift attitudes and create space for collective action. The authors argue that coming to recognize the theoretical underpinnings of our practice helps us become better practitioners.     

Triangulation of Salient Studies to Date on Trust-Building in Mediation

Many studies have empirically demonstrated the importance of trust-building between mediators and parties to a dispute. We wrote this article in response to a call by Stephen Goldberg and Margaret Shaw for studies conducted in North America to be triangulated in other countries where mediation is taking off as an alternative tool in the resolution of disputes. Our objective was to test theories on the factors that increase trust-building in mediation. With this in mind, the study conducted by Jean Poitras in Montreal (Canada) was triangulated in the Balearic Islands (Spain) and an analysis was made of the similarities and differences between both studies using different methods.     

Electronically-Mediated Dispute Resolution and E-Commerce

Although the volume of internet commerce continues to increase, some consumers hesitate to conduct business transactions on the internet because of concerns about the trustworthiness of on-line merchants. The presence of readily available, on-line dispute resolution services can send a reassuring signal to consumers that allays their fears and encourages them to do business on-line. However, on-line dispute resolution systems designed to address disputes arising from e-commerce transactions rely on a communication medium that is impoverished, which can lead to lower trust in the process, and to the escalation of negative emotion and negative attributions about the other participants in the dispute resolution process, making successful resolution of the dispute more difficult. A mediator or arbitrator in an on-line setting who is aware of these potential problems can try to avert them by engaging in simple rapport-building procedures. However, facilitating acceptance of on-line dispute resolution decisions may be more difficult than in a traditional face-to-face environment because of the absence of cues that communicate the trustworthiness and neutrality of the third party, as well as acknowledgment of the societal standing of the disputant.     

Confectionery and Conflict Resolution? What Chocolat Reveals about Mediation

A close analysis of the film Chocolat discloses a new metaphor for the mediator — the mediator as cook. The use of this metaphor throughout the film suggests new insights about mediator style and practice. Specifically, the mediator–protagonist in Chocolat demonstrates that: (1) mediations need not be voluntary to be sound, (2) non-neutral, directive, evaluative mediators can be effective if they individualize their approaches to each disputant and dispute, and (3) effective approaches to mediation celebrate emotion and pleasure, contrary to many conflict resolution theorists who write about the importance of emotions, but do not privilege them in practice.     

中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易争端解决机制法律问题研究——兼论广西的应对策略

《中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易协议》的签署推动中国与东盟各国服务业的开放与发展,随之而来的服务贸易领域的争端会不断增多且更加复杂化。因此,对中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易争端解决机制做透彻的法律分析,对推进中国—东盟自由贸易区服务贸易的发展具有重大的现实意义和理论意义。     

Some Minor Reflections on Conflict Resolution: The State of the Field as a Moving Target

Based on several recent meetings between the scholarly and practice communities of the conflict resolution field, the author observes that our understanding of what we consider to be conflict resolution is changing rapidly, and that the context of a particular dispute is often determining. To continue to build knowledge in the field, scholars and reflective practitioners should examine such topic areas as the nature of practice; differences between in-house and external mediation; expectations of all parties about change and outcomes; and the ethics of intervention.     

The Past,Present, and Future of Mediation as Seen through the Eyes of Some of Its Founders

This article is drawn from interviews with thirty‐one of mediation's “founders,” those pioneers who began mediating in the 1970s and 1980s, when the field was young. They describe what first attracted them to mediation and why they have remained active in the field. Some told us that they have found it to be both intellectually challenging and interpersonally satisfying to assist disputing parties in their search for a mutually acceptable resolution they could not find on their own. Others see mediation's collaborative approach to decision making as a means of bringing about social and political change that might be otherwise unattainable. The mediators also described the changes they have observed since they entered the field: mediation's dramatic growth, institutionalization in the judicial system, and market domination by lawyers and retired judges. Among the concerns they expressed were the prevalence of a mediation model that focuses primarily on the legal strengths and weaknesses of each party's position, and the dollar amount that should resolve the dispute, with little interest in creative outcomes. Other concerns are a lack of quality control of mediators and trainers, and unproductive debate about whether the “correct” approach to mediation is evaluative, facilitative, or transformative. The mediators who work on public policy matters, including environmental disputes, were the most positive about the opportunity for creativity in their work, considerably more so than those mediators whose practice is primarily business/commercial. The mediators' views of the future of mediation are remarkably similar — their general sense is that the type of mediation that takes place in the shadow of the courts is likely to increase and to become even more routinized than it is at present. Several respondents told us that they also expect to see substantial growth in the use of mediation to resolve public policy issues. Many of these mediators predicted that this type of mediation is likely to be carried out by organizational insiders, rather than outside interveners. As one mediator said, “Maybe there's a new set of mediation roles for people within traditional institutions, not just for free‐standing neutrals.”     

Blogwars,by David D. Perlmutter

Little is known about how elected representatives attempt to manipulate public opinion and news media through their participation on regional open line radio or media straw polls. This article examines the systematic attempts by political actors to engage these media in the small polity of Newfoundland, Canada, where politics is characterized by the hyper-local nature of 590-VOCM radio programming. Our mixed-method study draws from talk radio call-in logs, online straw poll vote results, observation of the production of open line programming, and insights from local media personnel. We draw attention to two clandestine media management techniques. First, we analyze call-ins by elected legislators to talk radio that were timed to coincide with the known field dates of a public opinion polling company. Second, we report that handheld communication devices were used by senior members of the governing party to mobilize legislators and party personnel to repeatedly vote on straw polls on regional media Web sites. Our findings show that there is a substantial and statistically significant increase in the probability that legislators will call talk radio when pollsters are in the field. Furthermore, we document and explore the manner in which political elites mobilize to engage online media straw polls, and discover that straw poll questions which address political topics attract a disproportionately higher number of “votes” than nonpolitical questions. This micro-level study offers perspective for interpreting macro-level knowledge about political talk radio, horse race/game and strategic media frames, and about political elites’ mobilization and media management tactics.     

Online Dispute Resolution: Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

Negotiation Journal - Will we ever see the day when the Internet serves as the primary venue for problem solving and dispute resolution? Social science research suggests that our online...     

泰国劳动争议处理法律制度初探

泰国作为东盟的重要成员国之一,其劳工争议处理法律制度比较成熟与完善,其中的劳动争议处理解决模式比较有特色,没有专门的劳工仲裁机构,劳工法庭是泰国劳工争议解决法律制度中的核心机构,解决劳工纠纷机构之间相互衔接比较好,值得中国借鉴和学习。     

Psychological Barriers to Resolving Intergroup Conflict: An Extensive Review and Consolidation of the Literature

This article reviews over sixty years of research on psychological barriers to intergroup conflict resolution and finds that scholars have identified eighty nominally different barriers that create or exacerbate intergroup conflict. In order to create a tractable list that would be more helpful to future scholars and practitioners, we consolidate this vast literature (e.g., by eliminating substantive and conceptual redundancies) to produce a list of twenty‐six “unique” psychological barriers. We further organize this inventory of barriers with a framework that distinguishes between “cognitive,” “affective,” and “motivated” psychological barriers. To better understand the literature ecosystem of research on psychological barriers, we employ a data visualization tool to illustrate the extent to which each of the twenty‐six unique barriers has been studied conjointly with every other barrier in the articles we reviewed. We then shift our attention to the work of scholars who have attempted, experimentally, to attenuate psychological barriers in negotiation and conflict settings, and identify five primary methods for doing so. Finally, we discuss the implications of our review for future work in this field.