'Portrait of a profession revisited'

On the walls of my private office hang the photographs of my seven distinguished predecessors as Secretary of the Cabinet. I sometimes find myself staring at them for inspiration, not always successfully I admit. A week or two ago I found myself looking at the great Lord Bridges, Secretary of the Cabinet and War Cabinet from 1938 to 1946. I wondered what he would have made of it if in the space of a week one of his predecessors had published an article in The Spectator advertised as ‘The Descent of the Civil Servant’ and another had appeared on the Frost programme to reassure the world that the Service was still in good shape. Both predecessors, Lords Butler and Armstrong, I hasten to say, were acting in the most supportive spirit and spoke from what for all of us is a deeply shared view of the role of the Civil Service. But, staring at Bridges, I could see a bubble emerging from his mouth enquiring: what precisely is happening on your watch, Sir Richard?     

Rocks and Hard Places: Managing Two Tensions in Negotiation

Theorists posit two fundamental tensions in negotiation. One is strategic: the tug-and-pull between creating value and claiming one's share of it. The other is interpersonal: the tension between asserting one's own interests and, at the same time, empathizing with the feelings and needs of other parties. ¹ This research report analyzes how negotiators experience these tensions in practice. Specifically, their self-perceptions about their relative competence in several key areas allow us to see how strength along one dimension (like getting the maximum) is correlated with other important skills. Some of the authors' findings confirm familiar models. For example, people implicitly feel that being successful at asserting their own interests imposes a cost with respect to understanding others. There were some surprises, however: most notably, people who rated themselves as strong value claimers also saw themselves as good value creators. The authors explore some of the implications of their findings for both practice and teaching, and foreshadow a follow-up report they plan. They also note how other researchers can access their data for their own studies.     

Vernacular rights cultures and the ‘Right to Have Rights’

We use a case study of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil and the Via Campesina network of which they are part to develop the concept of ‘vernacular rights cultures’. Vernacular rights cultures calls attention to the way in which demands for the right to have rights call on particular cultures, histories and political contexts in a manner that can transform the rights inscribed in constitutions and political imaginaries. What Ranciere (1999) and Balibar (2002) call the democratisation of democracy, we therefore argue, does not just involve a logic of equality and inclusion through which dispossessed groups demand already existing rights. Rather, it also occurs as mobilisations alter the means through which rights are delivered and transform the content and meaning of the rights demanded.