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.     

Getting Tough on International Child Abduction

International child abduction, typically undertaken by one of the child's parents, has become an increasing problem in recent years, particularly in the United States. Parents have encountered serious difficulties in repatriating an abducted child. The 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, signed by the U.S. and many other countries, establishes an international procedure for pursuing claims of child abduction. The Office of Children's Issues of the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the U.S. Department of State is the Central Authority that administers the Convention and its implementing legislation for the United States. In the author's view (and his alone), the Office of Children's Issues has not been sufficiently vigorous in seeking sanctions against countries that do not comply with the Convention. Even after Congress passed legislation in 2014 specifically directing the State Department to apply increasingly severe sanctions against noncompliant countries (the Sean and David Goldman Act), the State Department has still essentially failed to do so. Brazil is one signatory to the Hague Convention that the State Department itself has determined to be consistently noncompliant with the Convention since 2013. Yet the State Department has failed to impose significant sanctions on Brazil, among other countries.     

Is unauthorized immigration an immoral act? On David Miller’s ‘weak cosmopolitan’ defense of the right to exclude

While immigration is attracting increasing attention in political theory, there are as yet, few political theorists who adopt a restrictionist stance. With very few exceptions, the most political theorists have offered so far are pragmatic, not principled, defenses of the right to exclude. Looked at in this light, David Miller’s engagingly thoughtful book is surely a welcome and distinctive addition to the burgeoning literature on immigration. But readers who are looking for a normative counterpart to Joseph Carens’ Ethics of Immigration might be disappointed. In fact, the two books display more similarities than one would expect. Most notably, they share a common methodological ground: both reject top-down approaches, which proceed from abstract normative principles and apply these principles to immigration and integration policies. Yet, Miller’s realism reaches farther, giving greater weight to empirical evidence and focusing on institutions instead of on how individuals should act. This institutional focus is a key-defining feature of Miller’s political philosophy of immigration as distinct from an ethics of immigration. However, as I shall argue in the first part of this paper, Miller does not remain faithful to this distinction. He blames unauthorized migrants for acting ‘unfairly.’ But his criticism of irregular migration lacks a sufficient normative and empirical basis. The second part of the paper deals with the question whether legal coercion gives rise to a right to stay. My focus is in particular on the costs that irregular immigrants must bear when they are forced to go back to their countries of origin. These costs tend to be much higher than one expects.     

Love Scenes and Garden Plots: Form and Femininity in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Abstract

This essay reads Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) in relation to Alfred Austin’s garden book, The Garden That I Love (1894). The Garden That I Love presents the garden as a retreat modelled on the Horatian ideal, in which a man retires from public life to enjoy a peaceful rural existence. Von Arnim shows how the garden, or rather the good of retreat that the garden represents, is well-nigh inaccessible to a female subject. At the same time, she wants to claim the garden’s seclusion for the female subject. Ultimately, von Arnim takes the idea of feminine retreat to an unexpected extreme, generating, in certain passages of her text, a perverse garden fantasia that celebrates feminine autoeroticism and sexual self-sufficiency. Notably, it is specific aspects of the form of the garden book that allow von Arnim to develop her ambivalently feminist, unabashedly utopian vision of feminine withdrawal and retreat.     

Elizabeth and Her Mountain Garden

Abstract

In this essay the author suggests that Elizabeth von Arnim’s anonymous novel In the Mountains (1920) can be regarded as a modernist work, and is best understood in this context. The author indicates why von Arnim was intellectually and spiritually ready to develop her writing along these lines in the post-First World War era. This novel, like von Arnim’s early works—Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898) and The Solitary Summer (1899 Arnim, Elizabeth von (1899), The Solitary Summer, London: Macmillan. [Google Scholar])—is written in the form of a journal; the title, also like those of her early works, points to a symbolic setting derived from nature. However, the narrator of In the Mountains no longer appears as ‘Elizabeth’, but remains mysteriously and completely anonymous. This device, together with von Arnim’s stylistically innovative use of structures and motifs derived from nature and music, as well as her manipulation of time, perception and memory, demonstrates her unique approach to modern writing in this novel, inviting comparison with contemporary works by Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield.     

English Radicalism and the Annihilation of the ‘Progressive Dilemma’

The rise of political nationalism in the early twenty‐first century threatens to subsume the ‘progressive dilemma’ as identified by David Marquand. The labourist tradition is collapsing culturally, the liberal tradition intellectually. In the face of a new politics of nativism across Europe and America, the labour movement needs to put the debate over the progressive dilemma behind it and find a new source of philosophical inspiration in the English radical tradition.     

“Those who know don’t tell”: David Hammons c. 1981†

Drawing on original archival research, as well as discourses in post-WWII art history, performance studies, and black studies, this article maps the use of rumor closely associated with David Hammons, with regard to two performative actions enacted in downtown Manhattan in 1981, now known as Pissed Off and Shoe Tree. These two performances occurred on and around the public sculpture T.W.U. (1980–81) by Richard Serra. Taking up how these works consider the specificity of social life pertaining to historically marginalized bodies and neighborhoods, this article argues that Hammons’s work in this period employs obscurity as a resistance to knowledge as it is codified and legitimized in institutional discourses within and beyond art institutions.     

Rebuttal versus Unmasking: Legal Strategy in R. v. Zundel

Conventional scholarly wisdom has it that most Italian Americans in the United States were loyal supporters of the policies of Fascism in the inter-war years but eventually rejected the antisemitic measures that Benito Mussolini's regime adopted in their ancestral country in 1938. Contrary to such an interpretation, Luconi argues that many Italian Americans themselves held antisemitic attitudes and, therefore, did not distance themselves from Fascism after Mussolini launched his campaign against Italian Jews. He also contends that these attitudes resulted less from an ideological commitment to Fascism than from both the strained relations between Italian Americans and Jewish Americans, and the antisemitic climate of opinion that characterized American society in the 1930s. Italian Americans and Jews were partners in the labour movement and the Democratic Party. Yet the former resented the latter's distrust in Italian Americans' labour militancy, as well as the earlier rise of Jews in the hierarchies of the unions and the Democratic Party. Furthermore, Italian Americans and Jews competed for jobs, political patronage, cheap housing and relief benefits, especially during the Depression years. Such ethnic rivalries and the appeal of right-wing organizations to Italian Americans contributed to make the latter prone to antisemitism. As a result, few Americans of Italian descent came out against the racial policy of the Fascist regime.     

Profoundly Un‐Conservative? David Cameron and the UK Bill of Rights Debate

This article considers David Cameron's proposal to repeal the Human Rights Act (HRA) and replace it with a British Bill of Rights. Cameron's proposal has been heavily criticised by a range of political, academic and non‐state actors and was described by a current senior Coalition Cabinet member as ‘xenophobic’ and ‘legal nonsense’. This article takes a slightly different direction to those lines of attack and critique that have been developed of the Conservative's proposals. The central proposition of the article is that Cameron's proposal is profoundly un‐Conservative at two levels. Firstly, at the level of Conservative approaches to constitutional reform and secondly, at the level of Conservative political philosophy.