6th Module - Negotiation, Conflict and Culture

From Peacebuilding

Beyond the basics of principled negotiation and positional bargaining lie areas of greater complexity. One such area is the realm of culture. What has culture to do with negotiation? How do cultural differences affect the way people negotiate?

Is the “Harvard model” applicable in/with every culture? What happens when people from different cultures negotiate? To what extent can we possibly draw generalisations on other cultures’ approach to negotiation without running the risk of misunderstanding and misrepresenting others? Is a culturally informed approach to conflict resolution compatible with a Christian ethically informed conflict resolution? The content resources here provided focus on these questions rather than providing illustrations or generalisations about how people from different cultures negotiate. Their intent is to deepen exploration on the relationship between negotiation, conflict and culture.

Online Resources

• Senger, J. M., “Tales of the Bazaar: Interest-Based Negotiation Across Cultures”, in Negotiation Journal, July 2002, http://www.springerlink.com/index/VLBY3N3UE452MWKC.pdf “Interest-based negotiation, as popularised by Fisher, Ury, and Patton (1991), is a favoured negotiation style of many people in the United States and other parts of the developed world. The author, an American attorney who has travelled widely, assesses how that approach works in different cultural contexts. Using illustrations from his own experiences, the author shows how interest-based techniques work successfully, as well as the limitations of this approach in some situations” [from introduction]. The author focuses mostly on business interactions, but his insights might be useful and extended to other realms. In his concluding thoughts the author sustains that principled negotiation – while not universal – might be more useful that any other established theory of negotiation.

• LeBaron, M., "Culture-Based Negotiation Styles", in Beyond Intractability, Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, Conflict Research Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder, Posted: July 2003, http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/culture_negotiation/ LeBaron approaches this topic very carefully. First, she recognizes that it is difficult to characterize any national or cultural approach to negotiation without falling in generalisations. Nonetheless, she holds that generalisations might be useful “to the extent that the reader remembers that they are only guides, not recipes”. Second, while this article outlines some generalisations about cultural and national approaches to negotiation, she stresses that these should be taken as starting points rather than definitive descriptions, “since cultural groups are too diverse and changing contexts too influential to be described reliably”. Third, she reminds that “most of the ways of studying culture, communication and negotiation are derived largely from Western concepts” and she supports more research to be done on non-Western cultures by non-Westerners. Once safe, LeBaron introduces simple tools for analysing cultural differences, such as: time orientations, space orientations, nonverbal communication, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and masculinity-femininity.

• Black, P. W., Avruch, K., “Cultural Relativism, Conflict Resolution, Social Justice”, http://www.gmu.edu/academic/pcs/BlackAvruch61PCS.html This essay reflects on Jim Laue’s work in the field of conflict resolution. Laue applied a socially engaged Christian ethic to his work, with strong core values and concerns that resulted in an ethically informed conflict resolution. The single ethical question that dominated Laue’s work was “does the [third party] intervention contribute to the ability of relatively powerless individuals and groups in the situation to determine their own destinies to the greatest extent consistent with the common good?” In Catholic’s word, Laue claimed a “preferential option for the poor” for conflict resolution intervenors. The essay poses two simple but troubling questions: “Is a culturally informed conflict resolution compatible with an ethically informed conflict resolution?" And "does the spectre of cultural relativism require that one or the other be dropped?” The authors articulate the foggy concept of cultural relativism into three constructs: a) methodological, b) normative and c) epistemological, cultural relativism. They advocate for a more subtle and nuanced definition of culture than the conceptual and analytic dead-ends that anthropology has used to attribute to culture. They sustain that “methodological relativism emerges unscathed as an analytical tool, especially useful for pre-negotiations”, while normative relativism is less self-recommending and epistemological relativism is useless if not dangerous for developing theory and methods of conflict resolution.

• Brett, J. M., Crotty, S., "Culture and Negotiation", Evanston: Kellog School of Management, Northwestern University, 2006, http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/.../pdfs_docs/Speaker_series/Brett%20and%20Crotty%20Book%20Chapter%20final%2012-4-06.doc “Since negotiation is a form of social interaction and culture provides ways to handle problems of social interaction, it is reasonable to expect that culture will have an impact on negotiation”. The authors argue, “much of what we know [on negotiation] is based on research using samples from the United States and Northern Europe and is laden with values and assumptions that are Western”. What are culture’s effects on negotiation? The purpose of this essay is to analyse current research on the topic, highlighting two trends: a) the cultural dimension approach, conceptualising culture as a main effect and suggesting that “cultural effects are due to a variety of cultural dimensions of values, norms, and even institutional ideologies”; b) the constructivist approach, conceptualising “culture as interacting with context or individual differences or both to activate knowledge structures that direct negotiation behaviour”.

• Moore, C., Woodrow, P., “Mapping Cultures-Strategies for Effective Intercultural Negotiations”, in Track Two (Vol. 7 no. 1 April 1998), http://ccrweb.ccr.uct.ac.za/archive/two/8_1/p04_mapping_cultures.html or [[1]]. Moore and Woodrow choose a pragmatic approach to the realm of cultural differences vis-à-vis negotiation. Their aim is to provide a framework to identify, interpret and respond to cultural differences. First, they try to clear the way from two common mistakes people do when approaching cultural differences: a) an assumption that despite apparent differences, in the end, we are all the same and if we just communicate problems will evaporate; b) a romantic approach to cultural diversity that treats others’ cultures as exotic, sacred or deserving protection from cultural imperialism. They argue that - while it might be true that there are similarities between cultures and cultures are unique and precious - it is possible to “identify cultural similarities, build upon them and develop strategies that will help to bridge the important difference”. The core of this essay is an analytical tool (named “the Wheel of Culture Map”) that might help identify “cultural factors that shape the ways members of societies bargain for their interests and respond to disputes”. One could argue that effective application of the tools here provided is complicate, time demanding and it runs the risk of what Edward Said would call “orientalism” – i.e. by allowing ourselves to represent others we add our own interpretations to them, stripping them of the power to represent themselves. Yet, adopting a pragmatic approach to cultural differences and negotiation might help us activate to find solutions, without getting stocked due to the expanse and complexity of the problem.

• Starken, B. (ed.),et al., “Keeping a Cultural Perspective in Reconciliation Work”, in Working for Reconciliation: A Caritas Handbook, Vatican City: Caritas Internationalis, 1999. This chapter from Caritas’ publication Working for Reconciliation: A Caritas Handbook, does not focus explicitly on negotiation, but on the wider implications for Caritas’ engagement in conflict from a culturally informed perspective. After introducing culture as a complex construct and establishing its relevance for engaging conflict – “Culture is central to who we are and, therefore, central to understanding and interpreting how we do everything, from working to playing, even to how we approach conflict and conflict resolution ” – the relationship between conflict and culture is explored. The author argues that though often much of the attention is focused on external intervention (resources, agencies, mediators) “the most important aspect in the development of a framework for sustaining reconciliation is the building of a peace constituency using the resources within the community, including traditional leaders and community representatives and traditional methods for resolving conflict and reconciling communities”. The author advocates for approaches that adopt “culturally appropriate interventions [that] help re-establish the cultural structures which have been destroyed by war and which could play a vital role in post-conflict reconciliation”.

Activities you can use when working on these contents include

• Brainstorming on Culture and Negotiation. A classic brainstorming exercise.

• Questions Exploring Cultures Approach to Negotiation. The questions have been developed based on the contents in Moore, C., Woodrow, P., “Mapping Cultures-Strategies for Effective Intercultural Negotiations”, in Track Two (Vol. 8 no. 1 April 1998), see above. This activity works better when the group is composed of individuals belonging to (at least two) different cultures. If you work with a group that is culturally homogenous, you can ask them to focus on another culture that they think they know enough. Alternatively, you can ask them to focus on themselves when answering the questions – i.e. assess how their culture affects the way they negotiate.