Suppose you were headed into surgery, an operation of 26 elements, and as you were slipping under the ether you had the hallucination that your carefully selected surgeon had been trained in elements A through M–and was pretty much making up the rest as he went along.  Would that bother you?  Yes?  Would it reassure you any, if you then imagined that down the hall in another operating theater was another surgeon, also said to be one of the best, who knew N through Z backward and forward, but who for some reason had never been informed that elements A through M even existed?  No?
            Well, fortunately, to the best of our knowledge, you’re not facing that situation in surgery.            There is good evidence, though, that the professional equivalent of our surgical hallucination is operating every day in negotiation.  For instance, an international negotiation over locating a new plant in an indigenous area in another country will probably require dealings among lawyers, U.S. and foreign business executives, representatives of indigenous groups, and government officials and planners.             Assume everybody involved is exceptionally well-resourced—the lawyers are negotiation-savvy and were trained in some of the best law school programs in negotiation; the executives were trained in negotiation in top-of-the-line business schools; and everybody else involved was, in turn, trained in negotiation in leading graduate institutions.            Still, it is now increasingly evident that the differences in what has until now been considered relevant substance and doctrine among even the best of these programs are major, and almost inevitably will get in the way of much of the common understanding the negotiators seek to create.  Despite the great improvement in the training of negotiators over the past 20 years, the authors believe that fundamental improvement, among even the best trained, is still possible.

            Negotiation underlies a huge range of social activity and pervades a great variety of supposedly “legal” activity.  Research and teaching of negotiation have mushroomed in the past 20 years; by now, an understanding of negotiation’s essentiality is supposedly inculcated in many types of undergraduate, graduate and professional education.  Most researchers and teachers in the field maintain that negotiation is a universal phenomenon.  Yet the ideas currently taught and researched turn out to be based on quite different materials, and significantly different doctrines, in the various disciplines and types of schools, without much effort to determine whether or why this should be so.

            We have previously described, and even railed against, the truncated and even arbitrary structures of negotiation training.  For practical purposes these often seem to assert, at least impliedly, that the subject can be adequately learned in a single graduate or undergraduate course, or even a 40-hour crash course.  See Christopher Honeyman, Scott H. Hughes and Andrea K. Schneider, “How Can We Teach So It Takes?” 20Conflict Res. Q. 429 (2003). This was the lead article of a series of nine, which sought to expand concepts of training in the field.

            More recently, our focus has changed to the substantive contents of these courses.  Over the course of two large-scale projects that have sought to bring together many kinds of expertise in dispute resolution (see the Theory to Practice project, which is described at www.convenor.com/madison/t-t-p.htm; and the Broad Field project, at www.convenor.com/madison/broadfld.htm), we began to realize that even on the most basic element of dispute resolution—negotiation—colleagues “knew” very different things.  During 2003, we began an effort to assess and highlight those aspects of negotiation that are truly universal, but have not yet been generally recognized as such—essentially because they have emerged from separate streams of scholarship and discovery.

            As a result, we have identified systematic biases in the education that each of us has received, in what our teachers thought we needed to know (reflections, of course, of what they knew.)  It began to seem likely that an effort to create a cross-disciplinary “canon of negotiation” would yield dividends for each field taking part.

STARTING THE INITIATIVE

In the summer of 2003, we invited an initial group of scholars and practitioners to work on developing the “canon.”  Although we have been fortunate to work on previous occasions with some of the most famous scholars and practitioners this field has produced, in this instance we reserved their participation to a second phase, which is described below.  For purposes of the initial meeting and the writings to come from it, we decided instead to begin with a population that might seem counterintuitive:  We invited as the first participants leading members of the field’s second generation. 

            These younger scholars and practitioners, unlike those 20 years or more older, got into the conflict resolution field when it was already recognizably a field.  Because they actually had been through the initial courses designed by the first generation of leading scholars, they had been required to read materials in depth–and recently.  We felt that made for an ideal start.  We encountered ready acceptance in a wide variety of settings, inherently an indication that others felt the time was right for this effort. 

            The first 25 essays in the canon will be published this month as a special issue of the Marquette Law Review. [For information and copies, contact the Marquette Law Review, Marquette University Law School, 1103 W. Wisconsin Ave., Milwaukee, Wis.  53233 (414-288-7090).]  We can only describe them here briefly, but we believe they would be difficult to improve on at this stage of the field as crisp, concise, and up-to-the-minute assessments of the respective lines of research and knowledge-building they address.

            The fields have drawn from in scholarship, as represented in the articles, so far include law, psychology, behavioral economics, cultural studies, urban planning, and philosophy; practice backgrounds include labor mediation and arbitration, ethnic and tribal disputes, and civil and criminal disputes involving the U.S. Department of Justice. 

            This is, moreover, a work in progress. In the coming phases, described briefly below, it’s likely that the canon initiative will draw from additional scholarly fields and practice domains.

            The inquiry formally opened with a two-day symposium, held at Marquette University Law School in November.  The focus, then as now, was on the “semi-discovered”— the wisdom about negotiation that was truly universal in the evaluation of panels of experts, but up to now treated as relatively standard knowledge in one field while being mostly obscure to the next. (The list of topics that proved to be already taught and discussed across the participant fields was surprisingly short; see below.)  As expected, each person invited to the meeting had indeed come with material that was common knowledge in his or her own kind of school or practice, but “news” to others in the room—despite the fact that our colleagues, individually, were about as well-read as anyone you are likely to find in their respective parts of this field.

THE EXISTING ‘COMMON CORE’

As noted above, we needed to agree on subjects that were already so well taught and ubiquitous that they needed no further analysis and discussion in our setting.  But we also needed to eliminate subjects that, while important, were only important to particular disciplines, and therefore would not be a necessary part of any interdisciplinary negotiation canon. 

            Finally, we examined topics that at least some of us thought were crucial to any negotiation canon, but either unknown or insufficiently covered outside–and sometimes inside–THE respective disciplines.  In other words, the project was trying to discover what subjects should be part of an interdisciplinary negotiation canon, but were not yet.

            We quickly reached a rough agreement on which subjects would already be considered part of a negotiation canon.  The group identified about six topics that both should be part of any negotiation canonand already were taught in all of our respective disciplines.  In other words, these subjects already were part of an interdisciplinary negotiation canon.  They are:

 (1)  The idea of personal style or strategy or personality in a negotiation (including the concepts of competitive or adversarial versus interest-based or principled or problem-solving);

(2)  The use of communication skills—both listening and talking—in negotiation;

(3)  The concept of integrative versus distributive negotiations;

(4)  The concept of a “bargaining zone” between the parties as well as the concepts of “best alternative to negotiated agreement,” or Batna,  and reservation prices;

(5)  The use of brainstorming and option creation in a negotiation; and

(6)  The importance of negotiation preparation.

             These concepts are indeed found in the leading textbooks in a multitude of disciplines.  See accompanying box.  But by the terms of the initiative, these subjects did not warrant further discussion.

            The second step was to eliminate unnecessary contenders for the negotiation canon, by agreeing on certain items that were only taught in one discipline, but appropriately so and, therefore, should not be considered as part of a general negotiation canon. 

            For example, in relation to law, we agreed that issues of lawyer-client relations, the rules of professional responsibility, legal rules regarding settlement, and “bargaining in the shadow of the law” (and the court) all were issues that should be taught in negotiation courses in law schools—but not necessarily in other disciplines. 

            We attempted to make the same analysis for other fields, admittedly with a somewhat less solid consensus, because this initial group only had one or two other academics from each of the other disciplines.  For business, topics specific to the field included quantitative methods, intra-firm negotiations, “the manager as mediator,” and acquisitions.  In the area of conflict transformation and societal conflict, specific topics included the question of earning legitimacy, how to get the parties to the table, the fact there may not even be “a table,” and that factors always present include a long-term relationship and multiple parties.  Other fields that were represented generated similar specialty subjects.

            We were now ready to tackle the subjects that remained—what should be included as part of an interdisciplinary negotiation canon, but was not yet recognized as such.  This is a huge task, so the essays in the first symposium are but a “first take” on that task.

            Also, in the capsule descriptions below of the first series of articles, one caveat is in order: Some “topics” that are supposedly being taught in more than one kind of school or environment share a title, but not the same underlying material.  Thus while one or another of the titles below may look familiar, the subject matter may be quite different from what you expect to see associated with it, because of the author’s different discipline and viewpoint.

            The following are brief thumbnail descriptions of the articles in the canon’s first series:

1)   In “Action Science and Negotiation,” Scott Peppet, an associate professor at the University of Colorado School of Law, and Michael Moffitt, an assistant professor at the University of Oregon School of Law, explore how the research of Chris Argyris, a professor of education and organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, can inform negotiation practice and pedagogy. 

2)   In “Teaching Negotiators to Analyze Conflict Structure and Anticipate the Consequences of Principal-Agent Relationships,” Jayne Seminare Docherty, associate professor of conflict studies at Eastern Mennonite University, and Marcia Caton Campbell, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wis., explain how agency relationships work in a negotiation from a public policy perspective. 

3)   In “The Role of Apology in Negotiation,” Prof. Jennifer Gerarda Brown, of the Quinnipiac University School of Law, examines the purposes of an apology in negotiation and the qualities that make an apology most effective. 

4)   In “Aspirations in Negotiation,” this article’s coauthor, Andrea K. Schneider, explains the importance of setting specific, optimistic and justifiable goals in a negotiation. 

5)   In “Understanding Conflict in a Postmodern World,” Scott Hughes, an associate professor of law, University of New Mexico School of Law, explains how the emerging neuroscience work in complex adaptive systems (i.e., complexity theory), will affect how we view both conflict and some of the basic tenets of conflict resolution. 

6)   In “Contingent Agreements: Agreeing to Disagree About the Future,” Michael Moffitt surveys the theoretical and practical implications of including contingent agreements in negotiated deals. 

7)   In “Creativity and Problem-Solving,” Jennifer Gerarda Brown discusses recent thinking on how people can be more creative and which of these creativity tools can help the most in negotiation.

8)   In “Culture and Negotiation: Symmetrical Anthropology for Negotiators,” Jayne Seminare Docherty urges negotiators to go beyond the typical “tip of the iceberg” approach to understanding culture and the multiple cultural frameworks that can be at play in negotiation. 

9)   In “Decision Analysis in Negotiation,” Jeffrey Senger, senior counsel for dispute resolution at U.S. Department of Justice, examines how decision analysis can be used to assess the value of a case and to help to determine the best strategy in a negotiation.

10)  In “Emotions in Negotiation: Peril or Promise,” Daniel Shapiro, a psychology instructor in the Harvard Medical School psychiatry department, and an associate at the Harvard Negotiation Project in the Harvard Law School, tackles the common idea that emotions can be harmful in a negotiation.  While Shapiro outlines the risks of emotions, he also discusses the equal importance of enlisting positive emotions to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a negotiation.
 

11)  In “The New Canon of Negotiation Ethics,” Kevin Gibson, an associate philosophy professor at Marquette University, looks at the way that ethical considerations have moved beyond the legal threshold of “minimally acceptable conduct” toward acting in accordance with universal principles.  He also looks forward to the integration of sociobiology and post-modernism into our consideration of appropriate conduct in negotiation.

12)  In “Perceptions of Fairness in Negotiation,” Nancy Welsh, and associate law professor at Penn State University’s Dickinson School of Law, examines criteria for measuring both distributive and procedural fairness, and the variables that influence fairness perceptions.

13)  In “What’s in a Frame?  (That Which We Call a Rose by any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet),” Marcia Caton Campbell and Jayne Seminare Docherty discuss the dynamics of framing in an entrenched, large scale, multiparty conflict.  This use of macro-level frames is quite different from the micro-level framing that occurs as the negotiation communication actually begins.

14) In “Game Theory Behaves,” David Sally, visiting assistant professor at Cornell University’s Johnson School of Management, examines game theory’s usefulness–beyond the commonly taught “prisoner’s dilemma”–for explaining negotiation behavior.

15) In “Heuristics and Biases at the Bargaining Table,” Russell Korobkin, a UCLA School of Law professor, and Chris Guthrie, a professor at Vanderbilt University’s School of Law, tackle the interdisciplinary field of decision theory, which examines how individual negotiators can be affected by certain psychological factors to make “irrational” decisions about negotiation outcomes.

16)  In “Identity is More Than Meets the “I”: The Power of Identity in Shaping Negotiation Behavior,” Daniel Shapiro discusses the concept that negotiator identity is fungible in many situations.

17)  In “The Impact of the Impact Bias on Negotiation,” Chris Guthrie and David Sally explain that an emerging movement in psychology—known as positive psychology or hedonic psychology or affective forecasting—shows how negotiators may not even know what they want in a negotiation.

18)  In “Principles of Influence in Negotiation,” Chris Guthrie demonstrates how the concepts of persuasion presented by Arizona State University psychology Prof. Robert Cialdini can be used in a negotiation.

19)  In “The Law of Bargaining,” Russell Korobkin, Michael Moffitt and Nancy Welsh review the general common law, context-specific strictures, and ethical rules that constrain and guide the negotiator bargaining “in the shadow of the law.”

20)  In “Narratives, Metaphors, and Negotiation,” Jayne Seminare Docherty discusses how narratives and metaphors can help an effective negotiator understand the parties in a negotiation.

21) In “Negotiation as One Among Many Tools,” Jennifer Gerarda Brown, Marcia Caton Campbell, Jayne Seminare Docherty, and Nancy Welsh examine what factors and elements in addition to negotiation can be used to affect a conflict situation.  They examine some approaches that nonprofit organizations such as Search for Common Ground have used overseas, and demonstrate that these concepts can be translated into domestic conflicts as well.

21)  In “Three Conceptions of Power,” Jayne Seminare Docherty, Russell Korobkin and this article’s coauthor, Christopher Honeyman, present three different definitions of power and how each conception works in negotiation.

22) In “Rapport in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution,” Janice Nadler, an associate law professor at Northwestern University School of Law, and a research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, discusses how the development of rapport between negotiators affects negotiation outcomes.

23)  In “Team Negotiations,” Kathleen O’Connor, who is an associate professor of management and organizations at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management, and David Sally, outline the ways in which the presence of a team changes a negotiation.

24)  In “Social Maneuvers and Theory of Mind,” David Sally explains how the interpretation of communication signals—the theory of mind—should be further examined for lessons and advice that this can give negotiators.
 

WHAT COMES NEXT?

The sources of wisdom in this “composite field” are so diverse that this effort can succeed only if it thoroughly enlists criticism and amendment.

            The authors, accordingly, have provided for a series of occasions for corrections and expansion in the near future. These already include more than 16 conference sessions designed for the forthcoming 2004 national meetings of the American Bar Association’s Section on Dispute Resolution, the Law & Society Association, the International Association for Conflict Management, and the Association for Conflict Resolution.

            In this phase, we are looking forward to adding the experience and wisdom of some of the field’s recognized leaders to the debate.  We expect that these, in turn, as well as additional ideas from the emerging leaders with whom we began, will lead to further writings and discussions in this initiative.

Christopher Honeyman is a Madison, Wis., mediator who heads his own firm, Convenor.  He is director of the “Broad Field” project, a national initiative to create better cross-fertilization across a wide range of activity that constitutes conflict resolution.  The project is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.  Andrea Schneider is an associate law prof at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee.  The authors thank Menlo Park, Calif.-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for its support of the Broad Field project, and the Marquette Law School for its support of the November 2003, symposium that began this inquiry.