The coming year will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations by Richard Walton and Robert McKersie. It anticipated by almost two decades many ideas developed in Roger Fisher and William Ury's Getting to Yes, Howard Raiffa's The Art and Science of Negotiation, and numerous books that followed.
I first encountered A Behavioral Theory in a law school negotiation course in the 1970s. I always remembered the powerful distinctions that the authors drew between integrative and distributive bargaining (also known as creating and claiming value). Dipping back into the book recently, however, I was struck by how many other important aspects of negotiation the authors illuminated.
They covered “attitudinal structuring,” for example, bridging what we might call framing, incentive theory, and patterns of difference. They also recognized that the most challenging negotiations are often intraorganizational. And if you read closely enough, you can even see how their treatment of rationality in negotiation behavior presages cognitive research that blossomed much later.
A Behavioral Theory is still well known in the academic community and blessedly remains in print — if you look closely you will see it cited by authors in this issue. But it never quite made the popular splash that some later books did. Perhaps the word “labor” in the title led general readers to believe that the focus was solely on that field. The subtitle, An Analysis of a Social Interaction System, hinted of a broader reach, however, and the book's concluding chapter examined both international negotiation and conflicts over civil rights.
Walton and McKersie were not the first to study negotiation. They duly credited others who came before them, including John Dunlop, Thomas Schelling, and going further back, the prescient Mary Parker Follett. But their book broke new ground by analyzing negotiation across contexts and through a variety of lenses — economics, sociology, organizational behavior, and even a bit of law. They deserve our deep thanks for expanding the general field of negotiation analysis and providing an enduring foundation on which others have built.
Now, Bob McKersie has written a new book, A Decisive Decade: An Insider's View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement During the 1960s. While launching his academic career and helping raise his young family, McKersie was also deeply involved in the civil rights movement, especially around housing and employment issues. Susan Hackley reviews the book in these pages.
McKersie draws on a journal that he maintained during that tumultuous period. Reflecting back, he is candid about personal issues he grappled with, including finding his proper place as a white person in a movement that was itself struggling to define its identity. Although I have known him for decades, I was unaware of this period of his life. In his book and now in Hackley's review, I recognize the virtues of the generous colleague and gifted teacher we all know him to be.
I hope McKersie will be pleased by the company that he is keeping in this issue, starting with Mara Olekalns and Daniel Druckman's “With Feeling: How Emotions Shape Negotiations.” It is another in our occasional State of the Art series in which we ask experts in various areas of negotiation research to synthesize recent work and identify broader implications for practice and theory building. We hope to offer such pieces more frequently and welcome suggestions about other areas where new ground is being broken. Better still, of course, would be volunteers ready to follow Olekalns and Druckman's example.
We are also pleased to publish two articles, a research report and an in‐practice piece, that nicely complement each other. “Creativity in Court‐Connected Mediation: Myth or Reality”? by Lin Adrian and Solfrid Mykland, reports on their study of mediated agreements in civil cases in Norway and Denmark. The researchers compared the elements of final deals with the demands made initially and found that new elements were introduced in many instances. Their findings square conceptually with Jay Rothman's piece, “The Reflexive Mediator.” He emphasizes the emergent nature of the process. As he notes, collaboration is fostered when disputants come to see themselves and their problems in new ways.
“Procedural Justice and Conflict Management at School,” by Noa Nelson, Dikla Schecter, and Rachel Ben‐Ari, touches on an aspect of this, as well, although from the disputants' perspectives. Here, the authors studied conflict, surveying high school students about their perceptions of teacher fairness. Students who believed that their teachers were evenhanded were more likely to be accommodating themselves. But contrary to the researchers' expectations, perception did not lead to more integrative problem solving on the part of the students.
Turning to conflict on the world stage, we also have Peter Jones' thoughtful and timely “US–Iran Track Two from 2005 to 2011: What Have We Learned? Where Are We Going?” The Middle East has long been a volatile region, especially so for the last few years. It is a fair bet that the conditions that obtain as I write this note will have changed by the time this issue is in print. But for anyone trying to fathom how the United States and Iran can negotiate a more constructive relationship, Jones' assessment of the fits and starts of recent attempts at forging agreement via the track two process is important reading.
In this issue's second case analysis, Diana Panke's “Is Bigger Better? Activity and Success in Negotiations in the United Nations General Assembly” takes a nuanced look at international negotiation between larger and smaller states. Bigger countries have more clout, especially when it comes to elbowing a place at the bargaining table, but the United Nations General Assembly's one‐state/one‐vote rule tempers that advantage at least to some extent.
Panke's insight echoes what we at the Program on Negotiation (PON) heard this past spring from Singaporean Tommy Koh, whom PON honored with its 2014 Great Negotiator Award. Koh has had a distinguished career as a mediator, facilitator, and even as a negotiator for his own small country. Much of his success is due to his brilliance at coalition building and managing multilevel negotiations. My colleague James Sebenius, who leads the Great Negotiator project, is in the midst of documenting this most recent set of seminars and presentations. For a preview, see his recent post at http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/07/a‐great‐negotiators‐essential‐advice/.
Finally, just as McKersie in his book looks back to glean lessons from the early years of his career, so too does John Marks reflect on his career in this issue's column. Marks is stepping down this year from the leadership of Search for Common Ground, the pioneering international conflict management organization that he founded and has led for thirty‐two years. The glimpse he provides of this organization, its huge challenges, and its many successes is eye‐opening and inspirational.
