Formal Rules and Complex Negotiations: A New Theoretical Insight With a Psychoanalytical Lense

Abstract

In organizational theories as well as in negotiation theories, formal rules and the frame they form have not been studied in depth, even regarding complex negotiations which often remain intractable. In this paper, we begin by looking at the literature in both fields regarding formal rules and frames. The quasi-absence of research appears to come from the definition of rationality used by researchers: Simon's bounded rationality. We propose another definition of rationality which takes into account unconscious phenomena, inspired by psychoanalysis. We also conceptualize the negotiation frame and rules through this psychoanalytic lens. Here, formal rules and frames play a founding role in the negotiations helping the parties to accept their ambivalence and destructiveness. Contained by the negotiation's rules and a facilitator, the parties reduce their resistance stances, projections and repetitions; these phenomena impeding creativity in negotiations and the reaching of an agreement. Afterwards, we illustrate our theoretical proposal analyzing the movie Thirteen Days, on the Cuba Missile Crisis. We chose several key extracts to give meaning to the parties' interactions. We can see that, paradoxically, when the parties accept their unrational behaviors, it allows them to increase their rational ones.