Attentive readers will note that we have been publishing more review essays of late, thanks to the efforts of associate editor Bob Bordone, who has taken the lead in this initiative. Some reviews serve the worthy purpose of bringing notice to intriguing new work in negotiation and dispute resolution. We have also welcomed more ambitious essays that use one or more books as a taking‐off point to reflect on crosscutting issues or emerging trends.
The review in the current issue of the Journal is a first for us, as far as I know, as it has three authors: David Fairman, Hal Movius, and Patrick Field, all of the Consensus Building Institute in Cambridge. Enlisting a trio of reviewers was warranted by the scope and scale of The Negotiator's Fieldbook, given the audacious goals of its editors, Andrea Kupfer Schneider and Christopher Honeyman. Andrea and Chris have set out to define the “negotiation canon” in a hefty eight hundred pages. David, Hal, and Pat find much in the book to admire, even if reaching to catalog everything about negotiation is beyond mortal grasp.
In many respects the Schneider–Honeyman project shares the same hopeful spirit as the Journal. Over the years we have sought to illuminate theory and practice in a wide range of fields and contexts. Indeed, the breadth of our interests — and we hope, those of our subscribers — is reflected in this particular issue once again.
For example, it opens up with Jeremy Joseph's timely discussion of the U.S. military's wartime condolence payment program. For humanitarian and security purposes, the military currently pays relatively small sums to the families of those Iraqis killed or wounded in the cross fire between the military and insurgents. Joseph, a reserve captain in the Marines who has spent time in Iraq, argues quite compellingly that a redesign of the program to include culturally appropriate Arab‐Muslim mediation techniques would offer an opportunity to provide closure and catharsis for suffering Iraqis and, for the U.S., a chance to “win hearts and minds.”
In another timely piece, Joel Cutcher‐Gershenfeld, Tom Kochan, John‐Paul Ferguson, and Betty Barrett examine the state of one of the United States' oldest and most important negotiation institutions: collective bargaining. Drawing on three separate exhaustive surveys conducted over the last decade, they argue that collective bargaining is an “institution at risk.” Revitalizing it, they believe, holds potential benefits for all workers, not just union members.
This issue also includes two experimental studies that have yielded some counterintuitive results. For example, Jean Poitras has found that accepting one's share of responsibility for workplace conflict within a mediation can promote cooperation, but only when both parties admit some fault for causing the conflict. Paradoxically, reports Poitras, individual acceptance of responsibility runs the risk of reinforcing antagonism and stiffening the barriers to agreement — a finding that presents mediators with a bit of a conundrum.
In turn, Taketoshi Hatta, Ken‐ichi Ohbuchi, and Mitsuteru Fukuno examined the impact of two features of electronic negotiation that they call “correctability” and “exitability.” The former describes a negotiator's ability to revise messages on the computer before transmitting them. Not surprisingly, clarification and elaboration helped promote agreement in their experiments. The researchers also found that believing one's counterpart had attractive nonagreement options, and could thus easily exit the negotiation, promoted agreements. Cautious about pushing too hard on lower priority issues, negotiators in this situation focused their demands on the issues that mattered most to them.
In another article, William Donohue and Paul Taylor focus on the effect of role in negotiation. In an extensive review of decades' worth of literature, they examine the part that role identity plays in both experimental and naturalistic studies of hostage negotiations, labor negotiations, and divorce mediations, among other well‐studied negotiation situations. They conclude that certain roles and circumstances seem to put one role in the negotiation (e.g., the labor negotiator) in the less powerful or “one‐down” position. This leads, they argue, to some predictable and not always productive behavior on the part of the “one‐down” negotiator.
In his teaching note, Michael Watkins responds to a challenge issued in our January issue by Linda Babcock. Reviewing a book by Watkins and another by David Lax and James Sebenius on the role of moves away from the negotiation table, Babcock worried that the insights of these books have not been translated into appropriate curricular material. Watkins has replied with this discussion of a “manageably dynamic” multiparty simulation that he helped create, which is designed to integrate issues of negotiation design and teach students how to “shape the game.”
Finally, in this issue Lawrence Susskind and Carri Hulet present some new information on the state of the field of public dispute resolution. They report dollar and cents results on a survey of what and how professional mediators are paid to intervene in disagreements over the allocation of scarce resources and other public policy issues. Their data provide a hopeful snapshot of a maturing and increasingly important area of practice.
