Using transcripts from the Program on Negotiation’s Great Negotiator Award seminars, as well as teaching cases based on the work of the Great Negotiators, this article analyzes how several of these Great Negotiators worked to make connections and establish good working relationships with their negotiating counterparts. Connection requires taking on a stance of curiosity about one's counterparts, cultivating good relationships as a way to learn about them and their priorities, using moves that facilitate their ability and willingness to negotiate, and helping them save face in front of their key constituencies. Making connected moves at the moment can lead to turning points in a negotiation.

One overriding question that scholars have addressed over the past twenty‐five years is: are women the same or different from men when it comes to negotiating and what might explain these differences? The inquiry has shifted and has become more nuanced over time, but in its essence the issue of individual difference still dominates much of our thinking and research on the topic. The purpose of this article is to provide a structured overview of this considerable literature on gender and negotiation as it has evolved over the past twenty‐five years. In doing this, the article highlights how the social construction of gender has generally changed the discourse from essentialist concepts of differences between men and women to seeing gender as a more complex and shifting dimension of individual identity that is shaped by the contexts in which negotiation occurs. The second purpose of this article is to consider how recent feminist perspectives on gender, which have shifted from viewing gender as a property of individuals to considering the role of institutionalized social practices that sustain gender differences and inequities, can be incorporated into our understanding of gender relations in negotiation theory, practice, and research.

As parties bargain over the terms of an agreement, they are concurrently negotiating their relationship. In this parallel negotiation, parties seek to position themselves to advantage by using a variety of strategic moves. In so doing the other party can be put into a defensive position making it difficult to advocate effectively. Turns, such as interrupting, correcting, questioning, naming, and diverting, challenge these moves. Turns can be used restoratively to move out of a defensive position or participatively, to engage the other in collaboration. Anticipating strategic moves and having turns in mind is part of preparing to negotiate.

As interesting and significant as the Kaiser Permanente case is in and of itself, there were many parallel negotiations that took place just below the surface of the overt negotiations. The author focuses on this “shadow negotiation,” exploring a series of strategic moves that took place in the case, enabling the parties to craft their negotiation process. These shadow negotiations involved positioning moves, process moves, power moves, and appreciative moves. The parallel shadow negotiation was a significant factor in the success of the Kaiser Permanente negotiations.

The dominant paradigm in teaching about gender issues in negotiation over the past 25 years has been to treat the subject as one of difference‐men negotiate one way, and women negotiate another way. While this can provoke interesting discussions, there are pitfalls in treating gender in this way. The author suggests two other ways to approach the subject matter: viewing gender as emergent in the negotiation process or taking a gender relations perspective that highlights some of the invisible aspects of negotiation. The author suggests ways to teach about gender in negotiation courses from each of these perspectives; these newer ways of teaching about gender in negotiation help make it a more integral part of the curriculum.