WHY PARTIES AGREE TO MEDIATE

Although proponents of mediation have identified various advantages of mediation over other dispute resolution processes, utilization rates for many mediation services remain far below the expectations of their benefactors. This naturalistic inquiry explores why clients of child protection mediation actually chose to participate in mediation, and identifies differences with proponents' views of what makes mediation desirable.     

Personality underlying motivation for type A behavior in late adolescents

The personality profiles of Type A college males and females, carefully selected as especially vulnerable to stress, were compared with peer controls. The purpose of these comparisons was to determine whether some motivational goals of their excessive competitive striving might be identified by underlying personality traits distinguishing the Type As, whereas other goals might be eliminated. The results indicated that Type As of both sexes were more emotionally dependent and that their competitiveness could be an effort to elicit approval from others. At the same time, higher aggression in male and female Type As implied that the negative impact upon others of winning over them also was a goal of competition. No evidence for need achievement, mastery, or task proficiency as competitive motives was found. Implications of these findings and other significant results were discussed.Received Ph. D. in Psychology from University of Iowa. Current research interests are sources of stress in college students, sex role development, alcoholism, and criminality.     

Fairness and participation in evaluation procedures: Effects on task attitudes and performance

A laboratory study was conducted to examine the role of two components of participatory work evaluation procedures on fairness attitudes and work performance. Opportunity for influential opinion expression and knowledge of evaluation criteria were manipulated in a business simulation exercise. Thirty-eight male and 49 female undergraduates worked under a task evaluation procedure that either did or did not allow them to express their opinions to the evaluator. In addition, subjects either were or were not provided with specific information about the criteria to be used in making the performance evaluation, and they received either a favorable or an unfavorable outcome. Questionnaire responses indicated that influential opinion expression enhanced perceptions of procedural and distributive fairness independently of the outcome of the evaluation. Both knowledge of evaluation criteria and perceptions of evaluation fairness correlated with subsequent task performance. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to understanding the influence of procedural justice on attitudes and task behavior in organizational settings.     

Collective bargaining as public policy: Let us not pre-empt disaster

Abstract Collective bargaining can be justified as public policy as being an industrial relations system most comatible with the values on which our socioeconomic system is built. It may also be defended on the argument that ‘it provides a forum for the free and untrammelled propounding of alternative solutions and that its approach is superior to any alternative, even when all moral considerations about freedom and other such values are left aside.’ There are two major paradoxes in collective bargaining which affect both its use and perceptions of it: discrete and conflicting public interests; and distinct political components, ranging from the fact that collective bargaining is public policy to the uses of collective bargaining for the ulterior political purpose of effecting substantial political, social and economic change. The sources of present threats to the collective bargaining system appear to be five: an alarming increase in man-hours lost through work stoppages, accompanied by a rise in the rate of rejections by union members of tentative settlements; an increase in wage settlements substantially in excess of the rate of inflation and any increase in national productivity; an increase in the number of illegal work stoppages and other forms of unlawful behaviour; the increasing politicization of disputes; and the accumulation of public and private harm from disputes in essential services. The causes of the threats are unemployment, lack of productivity, and inflation, leading to a form of social disengagement in which the individual becomes indifferent to the impact of his claims. Free collective bargaining was never planned to accommodate such strains; it cannot carry the burden alone, and it should not take the blame. We must therefore be careful not to reject collective bargaining as public policy in haste and for the wrong reasons, even though there may be few options within the collective bargaining system which hold out any real promise of making the system work better in today's environment. Any lasting improvement in the operation of collective bargaining will come only from improvement in that environment, in order to accommodate the values on which collective bargaining is justified as public policy. Sommaire. On peut justifier les négociations collectives en tant que politique publique en les considérant comme le système de relations du travail le plus compatible avec les valeurs qui servent de fondement à notre système socio-économique. On peut aussi les défendre en soutenant qu'elles foumissent une tribune où envisager librement et sans contrainte les différentes solutions possibles et que cette approche est supérieure à toute autre, sans même faire entrer en ligne de compte toutes les considérations morales quant à la liberté et autres valeurs. Les négociations collectives présentent deux paradoxes principaux qui ont un effet à la fois sur leur usage et sur la perception de cet usage: intérêts publics discrets et en codits et éléments politiques distincts, allant du fait même que les négociations collectives constituent une politique publique, à leurs usages pour des raisons politiques particulières en we d'effectuer un changement politique social et économique important. Il semble que le système des négociations collectives soit menacéà l'heure actuelle pour cinq raisons: une augmentation alarmante du nombre d'heures perdues par suite d'arrêts de travail, accompagnée du rejet de plus en plus fréquent d'accords de princie par les syndicalistes; une hausse des salaires négociés dépassant considérablement le tam d'inflation et l'augmentation de la productivité nationale; une multiplication des arrêts de travail illégaux et autres formes de comportement contraires à la loi; une ‘politisation’ accrue des conflits; et l'accumulation de dommages publics et privés par suite de désaccords dans les domaines de services essentiels. Les causes de ces menaces sont le chômage, le manque de productivité et l'inflation qui créent une sorte désengagement social rendant les individus indifférents aux effets de leurs revendications. Les négociations collectives libres n'ont pas été conçues pour s'accommoder de ces contraintes, elles ne peuvent pas en supporter seuies la charge et ne doivent pas en être blâmées. Il faut donc éviter soigneusement de rejeter trop rapidement les négociations collectives en tant que politique publique et pour de mauvaises raisons, même si le système des négociations collectives n'offre que peu d'options qui promettent vraiment un meilleur fonctionnement du système dans l'environnement actuel. Toute amélioration durable du fonctionnement des négociations. collectives sera nécessairement la conséquence de l'amélioration de cet environnement afin d'accommoder les valeurs qui justifient les négociations collectives en tant que politique publique.     

Education and mass belief systems: An extension and some new questions

Using the SRC/CPS's national election surveys from 1956 to 1976, this paper investigates the effect of education on consistency among the public's domestic policy opinions. Evidence from both gamma correlations and factor analysis indicates that education has neither a strong nor a linear effect on issue constraint over the 20 years covered by the data, for the lowest and the highest education strata consistently show the highest levels of constraint. We do not conclude, however, that education is unrelated to recognition of ideological concepts, for almost one-half of the lowest education stratum do not use liberal and conservative terms. We conclude that issue constraint does not directly translate into ideology and suggest some new directions that future research should take if we are to evaluate effectively the effect of education on opinion structuring.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1978 Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association.     

Introducing “Cooperative Push”: How Inefficient Environmental Policy (Sometimes!) Protects the Global Commons Better

In this paper we argue that the incentive structures of the gamesnations play in international environmental negotiations dependupon the choice of environmental policy instruments. Bargainingon the use of some instrument (e.g. an effluent charge) mayput the players into a dilemma game (like Chicken). Negotiationsto apply a different instrument (say, an emission reductionquota) may lead to a cooperation game (like Stag Hunt). The higherthe incentive to cooperate in the type of game which is built upby a specific instrument, the higher is this instrument's``cooperative push''. Of course, comparing two instruments,the one with the higher cooperative push might well be the lessefficient one. In this Paper, we analyse a situation where thehigher cooperative push of an instrument overcompensates thisinstrument's lower efficiency: Aggregate welfare withbilateral cooperation (the equilibrium of Stag Hunt) is higher than withunilateral cooperation (the equilibrium of the Chicken game).The question remains whether sovereign countries decide to playStag Hunt ending up in the welfare superior equilibrium. It isshown below that they do not in an uncoordinated optimising setting.However, we develop a particular frame where the proposedsolution meets the criteria of individual rationality,stability and fairness. It thereby establishes the politically mostdesired result – international cooperation.