This issue of the Negotiation Journal, like the other issues, is noteworthy for its eclecticism. Witness this issue's two case studies. In one, Tom Smith painstakingly analyzes the transcript from a fairly ordinary business transaction and finds the negotiators using a wealth of metaphor. Business is survival of the fittest? A mall developer and the mall's retail tenants are engaged in a romantic relationship? Far‐fetched as it may sound initially, Smith's probing of the negotiators’ dialogue reveals these and other metaphors at work. Awareness of metaphor, he argues, can make negotiators more sensitive to each other's hidden meanings and true interests, and open up new and more productive avenues for dialogue.
In his very different case analysis, Larry Crump tells the story of the efforts of a group of Japanese‐backed investors to buy the Seattle Mariners baseball team in 1992, a proposition that initially generated quite a bit of controversy. Both sides in this complex negotiation comprised multiple parties: a group of Japanese and American businesspeople backed up by Seattle's business and civic communities on one hand and Major League Baseball, which comprised the baseball commissioner, the team owners, and the American and National Leagues, on the other. One side was able to successfully maintain its unity throughout the negotiations and overcome public opposition to the sale; the other side seemed to fall apart. Based on extensive research and interviews, Crump looks at how and why the parties on one side of the negotiation seemed to hold together better than the other side, and explores what this particular case says more generally about the mechanics of multiparty negotiation.
Lawrence Susskind, Robert Mnookin, Lukasz Rozdeiczer, and Boyd Fuller take a look at a different kind of multiparty negotiation. Rather than focusing on two opposing sides, each made up of multiple interested parties, their article explores what happens when there are more than two separate, interested parties at one negotiating table. Drawing on their many years of negotiating, mediating, and teaching experience, Susskind and Mnookin, with the help of Rozdeiczer and Fuller, have developed a course on multiparty negotiation for law and graduate students. In this issue of the Negotiation Journal, they describe the course, how they have taught it, and what they have learned from teaching it.
In another teaching note, Noam Ebner and Yael Efron introduce a new kind of conflict resolution training tool that they call “pseudoreality.” This quasi‐real, quasi‐fictional type of simulation, they argue, allows trainers, facilitators, and participants to overcome some of the typical conflict resolution workshop's most persistent pedagogical challenges.
In this issue's final article, Stephen Goldberg asked thirty experienced mediators to tell him what, in their estimation, has made them successful. One quality, the ability to achieve rapport with the parties, was cited by 75 percent of the respondents. But how, Goldberg asks, do they do this?
Although this issue is a bit lighter than our recent “super‐sized” January and April issues, we trust you will not find it lacking in either content or interest.
