More than Just a Footnote: Constructing a Theoretical Framework for Teaching about Gender in Negotiation

The dominant paradigm in teaching about gender issues in negotiation over the past 25 years has been to treat the subject as one of difference — men negotiate one way, and women negotiate another way. While this can provoke interesting discussions, there are pitfalls in treating gender in this way. The author suggests two other ways to approach the subject matter: viewing gender as emergent in the negotiation process or taking a gender relations perspective that highlights some of the invisible aspects of negotiation. The author suggests ways to teach about gender in negotiation courses from each of these perspectives; these newer ways of teaching about gender in negotiation help make it a more integral part of the curriculum.     

构建中日韩自贸区农产品市场准入谈判分析

构建中日韩自贸区,必定要在农产品领域实现贸易自由化,其中农产品的市场准入问题首当其冲。虽然中日韩已签署的双边自贸协定对三国间农产品市场准入谈判有重要的借鉴意义,但日韩为保护国内脆弱的农业,大量运用关税和非关税措施,并在多边农业谈判中就关税削减、特殊保障措施的存废等问题的立场与中国存在较大差异,这预示着上述问题将成为中日韩自贸区农产品市场准入谈判的难点。因此,即将开启的中日韩自贸区农产品市场准入谈判,应当结合有益的国内外实践,恰当规划谈判议程,遵守非歧视性原则,灵活设定关税削减问题中的农产品准入范围、过渡期,规范适用农产品特殊保障措施,从而推动该谈判各项共识的早日达成,进而加快中日韩自贸区谈判的进程。     

Pre-Settlement Settlement (PreSS): A Simple Technique for Initiating Complex Negotiations

Pre-setttement settlement, or PreSS, is a negotiation technique that precedes and potentially facilitates a final settlement. A PreSS is distinguished by three characteristics. It is: formal (being a binding agreement), initial (being the first step of a longer process), and partial (covering only a subset of issues). PreSS provides a conceptual umbrella for several existing concepts in the negotiation literature. The what, when, and why of PreSS are delineated and examples of pre-settlement settlement are provided.     

Using "Shocks and Rumors" to Teach Adaptive Thinking

The business landscape is constantly changing. Moreover, because of globalization, increased competition, and instant communication, the rate of change is accelerating. A student who has practiced only static scenarios is ill prepared to recognize, process, or adapt to changing negotiation issues and interests. Thus, negotiation instructors must change our practices to prepare students to succeed in the increasingly dynamic negotiation situations they will face by utilizing simulations that are also dynamic. This article reviews research on adaptive thinking, applies it to negotiation training, and provides examples of dynamic simulations that require students to adapt. Finally, it offers advice on how to make existing cases dynamic by using "shocks and rumors."     

Understanding Barriers to Peace: Reflecting on Israeli–Palestinian Economic Negotiations

Drawing on relevant negotiations literature, this article describes some of the main barriers in the negotiation process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as experienced by the author between the years 1998–2000. The analysis of these barriers is viewed through a prism of one case study: the negotiations regarding the economic component of the Wye River Memorandum. By subjecting that two-year negotiation process to a reflective analysis, this article not only attempts to shed light on the case presented, but also to help identify a wider range of barriers and behaviors that characterize the ongoing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.     

The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students

Lawyers should care about their reputations. But exactly what sort of reputation should lawyers seek to establish and maintain in the largely nontransparent context of legal negotiation? And even if a lawyer has developed a reputation as a negotiator, how will he/she know what it is and how it came to be? I force my students to grapple with these questions by incorporating the issues of reputation and reputation development into my negotiation/mediation course. I introduced this innovation at the same time that I decided to increase my focus on developing students' skills in distributive (or value‐claiming) negotiation. Although legal negotiation certainly offers frequent opportunities for the creation of integrative joint and individual gains, the process will almost inevitably involve distribution. The pie, once baked, must be cut. As a result, I now base a portion of my students' final grade on the objective results they achieve in two negotiation simulations. Two dangers of this assessment choice are that it can encourage students to focus only on the numbers and, even worse, engage in “sharp practice”— an extreme form of hard bargaining that tests ethical boundaries — in order to achieve the best short‐term distributive outcomes. Of course, neither a quantitative focus nor sharp practice is synonymous with a distributive approach to negotiation. Nonetheless, to counterbalance the temptations posed by the focus on, and ranking of, objective results, I also base part of students' final grades on their scores on a “Reputation Index.” These scores are based on students' nominations of their peers, accompanied by explanatory comments. This article describes the Reputation Index and how I use it. It also explores the empirical support for the validity of the Reputation Index as a tool for simulating the development and assessment of lawyers' reputations in the “real world.” To that end, the article considers research regarding the bases for lawyers' perceptions of effectiveness in legal negotiation, the sometimes counterintuitive distinction between negotiation “approach” and negotiation “style,” and the relationships among perceptions of negotiation style, procedural justice, trustworthiness, and reputation.     

Assessment Procedures for Skills‐Based MBA Courses Adapted from the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps Leadership Development Program

Measuring student progress toward the achievement of learning outcomes in negotiation skills courses is a difficult task. Measuring the effectiveness of the delivery of course instruction can be equally challenging. This article proposes some answers to these questions: How can student performance in skills such as negotiation, leadership, and teamwork (sometimes referred to as “soft skills”) be effectively measured and accurately evaluated? What standards can be used to determine whether student performance is superior, adequate, or inferior? How can teaching effectiveness be evaluated to determine whether students are receiving the instruction necessary to achieve the course learning objectives? This article describes how the authors collaborated on an adaptation of the assessment processes used in the U.S. Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) cadet Leadership Development Program for use in an MBA course on negotiation skills. We report on a pilot effort that has demonstrated that the ROTC‐style leadership assessment process can be successfully adapted for use in a graduate course on negotiation and that it provides useful means for evaluating both individual student performance and overall course effectiveness. While our work involved a negotiation course, we suggest that the process could be adapted for use in other skills‐oriented courses such as leadership.     

Hybrid Warfare,International Negotiation,and an Experiment in “Remote Convening”

The authors are leading a multinational effort to understand the effects of “hybrid” warfare on international commercial negotiation. The start-up process is itself essentially a negotiation, among about forty individual practitioners and scholars with very diverse backgrounds, over whether and how they will work together. In a pandemic, a key risk is that the necessary cooperation and trust will be harder to build, particularly among professionals who are dealing with security-sensitive issues and who have never met each other. This article discusses the current necessity of replacing the in-person model for eliciting such cooperation which the authors had developed previously for large collaborative projects, and describes a “remote convening” replacement process.     

When Negotiations Become Routine: Not Reinventing the Wheel While Thinking Outside the Box

In this article, we seek to apply the insights of recent research on routine to the context of repeated negotiations. To demonstrate the link between both concepts, we introduce an analytical framework in which we identify different negotiation situations in which routine can develop. We distinguish two dimensions of the negotiation process: a problem-solving dimension and a communication dimension. Our framework for analyzing the role of routine in negotiation is built around these two dimensions. We define those skills that we argue in repeated negotiations can help negotiators manage particular kinds of negotiations depending on the level and type of routinization that type of negotiation involves. Moreover, we demonstrate that our framework is inherently dynamic, which we illustrate with simplified business examples.     

Introduction: negotiating the promotion of democracy

ABSTRACT

This article makes the case for why we should turn to studying democracy promotion negotiation, outlines the research questions guiding this special issue, identifies overarching findings and summarizes the individual contributions. After outlining the rationale for more attention to the issue of negotiation, which we understand as a specific form of interaction between external and local actors in democracy promotion, we outline three basic assumptions informing our research: (1) Democracy promotion is an international practice that is necessarily accompanied by processes of negotiation. (2) These negotiation processes, in turn, have an impact upon the practice and outcome of democracy promotion. (3) For external democracy promotion to be mutually owned and effective, genuine negotiations between ‘promoters’ and ‘local actors’ are indispensable; the term ‘genuine’ here being understood as including a substantial exchange on diverging values and interests. The article, then, introduces the three research questions for this agenda, concerning the issues on the negotiation table, the parameters shaping negotiation processes, and the results of democracy promotion negotiation. We conclude by presenting an overview of the overarching findings of the special issue as well as with brief summaries of the individual contributions.     

The Effect of Advice on Negotiations: How Advisors Influence What Negotiators Do

Studies of negotiations often overlook, or at least do not fully account for, the important role played by people who advise negotiators. Often deliberately hidden from view, advisors have important but unrecognized influence on the negotiation dynamic. In this article, I explore the roles and methods of advisors in the negotiation process, drawing on role theory and survey research conducted in 2013 among approximately seventy advisors at the European Union Council of Ministers. I define advice as “a communication from one person (the advisor) to another (the client) for the purpose of helping that second person determine a course of action for solving a particular problem” and consider the nature of this advice and the range of relationships that may exist between advisors and their clients. Advising is much more than the mere transmittal of information from advisor to negotiator and that for advice to be effective a relationship must exist between the two parties. I then identify three models of the advisor–negotiator relationship. The first is the advisor as director, wherein the advisor tends to take control of the negotiating process, directing the negotiator toward actions that she or he should take to achieve success at the negotiation. The second is the advisor as servant, in which the advisor merely responds to the demands of the client for help and guidance in the negotiation. And the third is the advisor as partner, wherein advisor and negotiator jointly manage the process and solve the problem together. Finally, I explore the factors that lead advisors and negotiators to adopt each of these three models, the various advising styles that advisors use, and the differing effects on the negotiation process that these elements may have, drawing on historical examples as well as survey data from the EU Council of Ministers.     

Is Teaching Negotiation Too Easy,Too Hard,or Both?

Teaching negotiation is easy because teachers and students find the topic fun, interesting, and relevant, which makes most negotiation courses well received. At the same time, teachers may underestimate the challenges in getting their students to think and behave differently in negotiation, which can make it difficult to teach it well. The author examines three teaching challenges in particular: dealing with ethical issues, addressing power imbalances (including those implicated by gender and racial differences), and putting theory into practice in the form of real-world behavior change. This piece is an adaptation of the keynote address that the author delivered on November 14, 2005 at the PON-IRENE conference, New Trends in Negotiation Teaching: Toward a Transatlantic Network , in Cergy, France.     

One Reasonable and Inquiring Man: 12 Angry Men as a Negotiation-Teaching Tool

The film 12 Angry Men is often shown in law school and business school to teach lessons about negotiation, group process, communication, decision making, team building, leadership, and critical thinking. It effectively and powerfully depicts the ways in which a successful negotiator can make critical moves and capitalize on turning points in a negotiation. It also illustrates vividly such key negotiation concepts as the difference between positions and interests and the role of such skills as coalition building, framing, and active listening. For these reasons, 12 Angry Men can be a powerful negotiation teaching tool.     

Mega-Simulations in Negotiation Teaching: Extraordinary Investments with Extraordinary Benefits

A mega-simulation is a complex-negotiations teaching exercise involving complicated issues and challenging conditions that is undertaken by three or more teams of students. In this article, I draw on two decades of teaching with mega-simulations in international business negotiation courses to discuss potential learning goals for this type of experiential exercise, effective ways to organize the experience, challenges for the instructor, and the distinctive educational benefits that justify the substantial investment of time and resources required to implement these mega-simulations. These simulations can help students to develop greater sophistication in basic negotiation skills, become more extensively exposed to complex skill sets, and develop a deeper understanding of negotiation subject matter and complex processes than they would by conducting standard role plays. Mega-simulations offer major opportunities for students to move to advanced levels of negotiation skill not just in international business, but in diplomacy, law, engineering, and a host of other professional arenas.     

Managing the negotiation agenda

Conclusion The agenda is one of the main structural elements of negotiation, in addition to such questions as site, identification of participants, and elements of timing. Together, they answer the who, what, when, and where questions. As with other aspects of negotiation, the agenda can be used either manipulatively to enhance leverage or to improve the prospects for agreement and the possibilities for mutual gain. In most cases, it will be used both ways, reflecting the nature of negotiation as a mixed-motive situation.Although it can be instrumental to volunteer as a sole source to write the agenda, in most cases it becomes a joint activity to construct a consensual basis for subsequent negotiation. In these situations, agenda-building becomes one of the pre-negotiation activities that set the tone for the relationship (Saunders, 1985). In other situations, the parties may engage in actual negotiation without a formal or written agenda. When this occurs, the risks and uncertainties may be high but the party who appreciates the importance of the informal agenda has a tremendous advantage.Whether one plans it or not, during the course of negotiation the parties will discuss a finite set of issues in some sequence and from a particular perceptual framework. Consciousness of the universality and centrality of the agenda is prerequisite to guiding negotiation to a successful conclusion. William R. Pendergast is Associate Dean at Boston University's Metropolitan College, 755 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, Mass. 02215, where he teaches graduate courses and executive development seminars on negotiation. He is preparing research on power and influence, and on strategic choice in negotiation.     

Interests vs. positions: A critique of the distinction

Getting to YES has popularized the focus on interests rather than positions in negotiation. However, sometimes an emphasis on interests, to the exclusion of the positions of the parties, can be counterproductive. Among other issues, this article highlights difficulties stemming from: ambiguities in the meanings of the two words; the significant role that positions play in negotiation dynamics, particularly in communication and in intergroup bargaining; and negotiations that hinge partly on people's values and perceptions rather than interests.He is co-editor of the recent bookThe New Industrial Relations in Australia (Sydney: Federation Press, 1995).     

Why Do We Respond to a Concession with Another Concession? Reciprocity and Compromise

All negotiation processes involve an exchange of concessions, and compromise is an agreement based on mutual concessions. Hence the questions investigated in this article: Why are concessions in negotiations always reciprocal? Why do negotiators follow this rule? And why do negotiators achieve these concessions through a process that we call compromise? Is there a connection between conceding and promising? In this article, I examine the structure of concession making and compromise through sociological, anthropological, and etymological lenses to better illuminate this critical negotiation component.     

Analyzing Complex Negotiations

Complex negotiations have been conducted for a long time, although until somewhat recently analysts had yet to conceptualize their fundamental nature, their essential elements, and the relationship between these elements. Over the past forty years, however, scholars have gained increasing understanding of the forces that shape negotiation complexity. In this article, I first review literature that has explored complex negotiations, which is found primarily in negotiation studies, and studies of international negotiation. I then develop a five‐part theoretical framework for analyzing complex negotiations: (1) identification of negotiation architecture, (2) context analysis, (3) process analysis, (4) structural and relational analysis, and (5) decisional analysis. I then demonstrate the utility of this five‐part framework by examining the U.S.–Australia Free Trade negotiations that produced the Australia–U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 2005. Finally, the article closes with some observations on complex negotiations and their analysis.