Collective Negotiations Research Articles

Life in the Huddle: Risk, Representation, and the Labour of Athletic Practice in Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves

Despite being framed by its author as “not really about soccer,” Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated play The Wolves acutely dramatizes the social dynamics that mark the girls’ indoor soccer team at its centre. Sports plays like DeLappe’s are useful contributions to the political discourses on women’s sport because they de-contextualize sportswomen from the prerogative to win, a cultural compulsion that often feeds individualistic “post-feminist” ideologies and perpetuates the dubious supposition that athletic excellence is a pathway to external liberation. Drawing from Holly Thorpe, Marianne Clark, and Julie Brice’s notion of biocultural creativity, this article demonstrates how The Wolves illuminates the performative processes through which sportswomen cultivate their personal and communal bodies, often in response to institutions that exacerbate the risks already inherent in the sport. By holding The Wolves in tension with uncritical presumptions regarding the “transcendency” of sport and in conversation with the well-earned successes of the United States Women’s National Team, this article asserts that the limits of sport’s representational frameworks must be complemented with a nuanced grasp of women’s sporting politics, a politics that requires collective negotiation with vulnerability as it persists in structures within and beyond the elite level.

TikTok’s queer public culture of mental health support

TikTok offers LGBTQ+ young people a queer public through which to negotiate mental health difficulties. Data from an Australian survey of LGBTQ+ young people was analysed to consider TikTok-specific mental health support. Five key themes of support related to: 1) sharing experiences; 2) encountering ‘people like me’; 3) comfort and safety; 4) mental health education; and 5) feeling less alone. These overlapping themes foreground the affective aspects of TikTok use for many LGBTQ+ young people, reflecting Cvetkovich’s theorization of ‘queer public cultures’. This can be seen in LGBTQ+ young people’s collective negotiations of mental health on TikTok — as a platform that offers new affective connections to queer culture, while continuing an ongoing culture of peer support forged through collective struggle, survival, and creative practice.

Becoming an Active Subject: Women's Art Collective Eco-Artivism for Ecological Sustainability in Indonesia

Becoming an Active Subject: Women's Art Collective Eco-Artivism for Ecological Sustainability in Indonesia

Post-Paris agreement negotiations: A commitment to multilateralism despite the lack of funding

This paper identifies which topics of negotiation are providing momentum for climate negotiations after the Paris Agreement and to what extent. To do so, it examines the main requests that developing countries have expressed through different negotiation groups between 2017 and 2023. To measure the progression of climate negotiations, the paper identifies whether those requests have been translated into COP decisions. This is done through discourse analysis contained in numerous daily reports of COPs, summaries, and official decisions. In this research, COP decisions are defined as the expression of collective negotiations in the UNFCCC system, and as decisions with political consequences. The paper identifies advancements on twenty-nine issues in areas like gender, loss and damage, facilitative dialogue, adaptation, and the acceleration of finance flows to small-island developing states. Eighteen issues have been identified as acknowledged in COP decisions, but not fully addressed. These correspond mainly to finance-related items and the commitment to contributing US$100 billion to climate mitigation. Sixteen issues have been identified as ignored in the COP decisions examined. The conclusions suggest that there is agreement on creating new frameworks to allow further discussions on important topics brought to the table by developing states, but there is no real agreement on increasing funding in a significant way. Also, conclusions underline that despite the lack of sufficient funding, commitment to fighting climate change has not declined over time, and states continue to prefer multilateral negotiations to working outside the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change mandate.

The Bride Wealth of the Ambai Serui Tribe Marriage: A Christian Faith View

A bride wealth is a package of cultural items and money given to the bride and her family by the groom family as a prerequisite for a formal wedding. Bride wealth is practice is ubiquitous, increasingly expensive and creates various marriage related personal and social problems. The objective of this study is to describe the process of determination, material elements, delivery and cultural meanings of bride wealth in the Ambai tribe traditional wedding. The study was conducted using autoethnography methodology supported with in-depth interviews with two emic resource persons, and documentary, photos and videos as secondary sources of data and information. The study shows that in the Ambai tribe tradition, the bride wealth is a prerogative request of the bride nuclear family but it goes through a collective negotiation process that makes it remain reasonable and acceptable to all parties. The bride wealth related processions strengthen the social bonding and the materials reflect indigenous wisdom of the Ambai tribe. Christian education on bride wealth is expected to strengthen the existing culture. Christian education should be able to maintains indigenous culture without in conflict with the principles of the Christian faith.

Social dialogue quality and workers’ health as perceived by Belgian trade union representatives during the COVID-19 pandemic

Union representatives were surveyed throughout Belgium between August and December 2021 through an online questionnaire ( N = 469) to assess the relationship between trade union representatives’ perception of social dialogue quality and change in workers’ physical and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a modified Poisson regression for binary outcomes controlling for company characteristics, pre-pandemic self-reported health and pandemic-related measures. A total of 30.1% of the sample reported the social dialogue quality has deteriorated during the pandemic. Relative risks (RRs) of poor physical and mental health when social dialogue has worsened are 1.49 (95%CI (95% confidence interval) = 1.03; 2.15) and 1.38 (95%CI = 1.09; 1.74). Controlling for pandemic-related measures slightly reduces the risk of both poor mental (RR = 1.25; 95%CI = 0.84; 1.87) and physical health (RR = 1.18; 95%CI = 0.94; 1.49). Although based on self-reported variables, the study shows an association between poor social dialogue quality and health and underlines the need to look at company-level collective negotiation.

Accessibility, Independence and Impartiality of the Traditional Court System

A few metrics of procedural indigeneity such as accessibility, expeditiousness, informality, affordability, and lack of “cumbersomeness” account for the traditional court system’s suitability as a system for resolving conflicts among black, poor, marginalised and disadvantaged African communities. As a system that regulates the legal affairs of groups that constitute the majority of the South African population, traditional courts are a perfect instrument for catering for the needs of the mostly unsophisticated black citizens. These qualities by far outweigh the system’s relative weakness when it comes to the attributes of independence and impartiality of its courts, both of which—commendable as they are—are less necessary in a system that is based on communal participation and collective negotiation. Judicial independence and impartiality interpreted and understood in relation to the Western concept of the separation of powers is alien to the customary legal system. Traditional courts are community-based, characterised by open justice, and designed to settle disputes in their defined areas of jurisdiction. They were established from time immemorial for such purpose and, to further its colonial objectives, the colonial government recognised them through the enactment of the Black Administration Act, 38 of 1927. There was a complete disregard for the views of the adherents to customary legal systems when legislating on the system and people's lives. The promulgation of such an Act brought about legal dualism in South Africa: common law and customary law. The Black Administration Act was enacted to administer the affairs of blacks and control the administration of traditional institutions and courts. The Black Administration Act discriminated between litigants based on race and dispensed inferior justice to blacks. During the apartheid system, various discriminatory laws were promulgated, resulting in the establishment of homelands and independent states within South Africa. This gave rise to disparate laws governing black people and their court system. The Constitution and the legislation specifically dealing with the customary legal system have ended discriminatory laws and social order that characterised colonialism and apartheid. Traditional courts are well-placed to create, enhance, and facilitate access to courts for all people, regardless of race, colour, gender, or any socio-economic diversity. This article intends to outline the effectiveness of the traditional system and to also address criticisms levelled at the traditional legal system, based on variations in practice and alleged exclusion of women from traditional justice mechanisms. These criticisms can be addressed effectively by traditional court systems aligned and dedicated to equality, democracy, and human rights protection. They can also be addressed through harmonising, integrating, and unifying customary law, common law, and constitutional values.

Changing roles of health insurers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands: any lessons to learn from Bismarckian systems?

Bismarckian health systems are mainly governed by social health insurers, but their role, status, and power vary across countries and over time. We compare the role of health insurers in three distinct social health insurance systems in improving health systems' efficiency. In France, insurers work together as a single payer within a highly regulated context. Although this gives insurers substantial bargaining power, collective negotiations with providers are highly political and do not provide appropriate incentives for efficiency. Both Germany and the Netherlands have introduced competition among insurers to foster efficiency. However, the rationale of insurer competition in Germany is unclear because contracts are mostly concluded at a collective level and individual insurers have little power to influence health system efficiency. In the Netherlands, insurer competition is substantially more effective, but primarily focused on price and cost containment. In all three countries, the role of insurers has been transforming slowly to respond to common challenges of assuring care quality and continuity for an ageing population. To assure sustainability, they need to ensure that care providers cooperate with the same quality and efficiency objectives, but their capacity to do so has been limited by insufficient support to enforce public information on provider quality.

The complexity of situated text design: a negotiation between standardization and spoken language in a manufacturing company

In information design textbooks, text design is mostly understood as typography and layout. The meaning-making process of language, involving social interaction that affects language, is rarely acknowledged. Instead, texts are supposed to be “clearly” written. In this research article, we argue that the understanding of text design could benefit from also addressing text production and use situated amid social activity. This article presents a study on a text design process partly based on spoken language and owned by assembly operators in a workplace. Capturing the spoken dialogue and transforming it into instructive texts resembling transcripts are essential steps in securing the best practices for the smallest tasks in manual assembly, the minima of working, which is crucial for manufacturing. Our aim within the information design field is 2-fold: To underline the meaning-making process in language as a social phenomenon and to show that the situated design perspective, i.e., an outlook that highlights the uniqueness of the setting, can be important for the production and use of certain texts, such as instructions, and for affecting language. We asked ourselves: What are the consequences for the information design field when meaning-making in a language is understood as being socially situated in an activity? We have studied a design process and used observations, interviews, and text analysis to gather data. The result showed that the workers' ownership of text documents is crucial for the texts' use, yet the texts used do not meet the standard of information design textbooks. Moreover, the design of the text involves a continuous and non-linear collective negotiation that balances standardization in language and work procedures with the incorporation of operators' linguistic improvements. We unfold a case of text design where there is a closeness of designer and user roles, a non-linearity of the process, and an understanding of an information design product as becoming rather than having been finalized for use.

Remote work in Ukraine: problems and prospects of improving its legal regulation

The article is devoted to the problems and prospects of legal regulation of remote work in Ukraine. Attention is paid to international and European standards dedicated to the features of remote work. Special attention is devoted to the study of the problems of limiting remote work for certain categories of workers under martial law. The conclusion is justified that the concept of “remote work” can be used to denote two phenomena that are different in their content. Firstly, remote work is a special mode of work that can be applied temporarily by the employer’s decision as a forced measure in the event of certain life-threatening circumstances or people’s health. Secondly, remote work as a special labour organization provides that teleworkers constantly perform work outside the employer’s location due to the specificity of their labour function. The use of an electronic digital signature in the interaction between the employer and the remote worker is a separate problem in the course of organizing remote work.The question arises about the financial costs of obtaining it (on whom they should rely)and the need to use such a signature when familiarizing the remote worker with the orders, job description, and local acts of the employer. Also, the possibility of bringing a teleworker to disciplinary responsibility remains an unsolved problem, in particular, in what way the disciplinary offenses of such a worker should be documented, and his guilt should be established if the improper performance of labor duties was due to technical reasons or other circumstances independent of the worker. The latter becomes especially relevant in the current conditions of a full-scale war with russia, given the difficult situation in the dilapidated energy system of Ukraine, constant power outages and lack of mobile or internet connection. Proposals regarding the need to improve the legal regulation of remote work in a separate section of the Labour Code are formulated. In particular with the regulation of the ways of interaction between the employer and the teleworker in the process of performing work (the order of protection and exchange of information, transfer of the employer’s tasks, control over their execution); access of teleworkers to opportunities for training and career growth; the mechanism for protecting the rights of teleworkers with the help of trade unions, their participation in collective negotiations and the resolution of collective labour disputes. Key words: remote work, special form of labour organization, labour contract on remote work, non-standard employment.

Abuse exercise of the right to strike

Trade union organizations/elected representatives of employees, in their capacity as subject of collective labor relations, may abusively exercise their subjective rights both at the time of conclusion and at the time of modification, suspension and termination of the collective labor contract. A special situation emerges in the case of the abusive exercise of the right to the association and the abusive exercise of the right to strike and the rights of trade union organizations, of the elected representatives of employees, as the case may be. The right to strike, being a means of ensuring collective negotiations, cannot abusively harm the interests of the other party. In the following article, those situations of abusive exercise of the right to strike will be highlighted, wherein the limits of the exercise of this right are intentionally exceeded by the elected representatives of the employees. Starting from the idea that the strike is declared in order to protect the social interests of employees, the abusive exercise of the right to strike must be evaluated taking into account the prejudicial result of the strike in relation to the organizers' intention and interest to produce this result.

Becoming an Online Wine Taster: An Ethnographic Study on the Digital Mediation of Taste

There has been a growing interest in taste research in the HCI and CSCW communities. However, the focus is more on stimulating the senses, while the socio-cultural aspects have received less attention. However, individual taste perception is mediated through social interaction and collective negotiation and is not only dependent on physical stimulation. Therefore, we study the digital mediation of taste by drawing on ethnographic research of four online wine tastings and one self-organized event. Hence, we investigated the materials, associated meanings, competences, procedures, and engagements that shaped the performative character of tasting practices. We illustrate how the tastings are built around the taste-making process and how online contexts differ in providing a more diverse and distributed environment. We then explore the implications of our findings for the further mediation of taste as a social and democratized phenomenon through online interaction.

The Feudal Contract and the Monarchy in Medieval England

In interpreting the feudal contract between kings and nobles in medieval Western Europe, Western historians have tended to elaborate on its interaction, equivalence, and even equality, with an emphasis on the resulting restrictions on the king’s authority. However, this was not the case in England during this period. After the Norman Conquest, “imported feudalism” became a strong support for the English monarchy. On this basis, the feudal contract between kings and nobles evolved from an oral to a textual contract and from “personal commitment” to “collective negotiation,” in a process strongly marked by the coercion and inequality bestowed on such contracts by hierarchical feudal roles. In the course of this process, the English kings ceaselessly consolidated their power by breaking down the feudal customs reflected in agreements between the two sides. Although the Magna Carta, as a text-based feudal contract, made explicit provision for feudal customs, it failed to effectively constrain royal power. History shows that if we seek to elaborate on the reciprocity and even equality of the feudal contract from the perspective of modern social contract theory and thus exaggerate the nobles’ right to resist the king, we will inevitably construct a mythical “feudal contract determinism.”

Real-world data for precision cancer medicine-A European perspective.

Leveraging real-world data (RWD) for drug access is necessary to overcome a key challenge of modern precision oncology: tackling numerous low-prevalence oncogenic mutations across cancers. Withholding a potentially active medication in patients with rare mutations for the sake of control chemotherapy or "best" supportive care is neither practicable nor ethically justifiable anymore, particularly as RWD could meanwhile be used instead, according to scientific principles outlined by the US Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency and other stakeholders. However, practical implementation varies, with occasionally opposite recommendations based on the same evidence in different countries. In the face of growing need for precision drugs, more transparency of evaluation, a priori availability of guidance for the academia and industry, as well as a harmonized framework for health technology assessment across the European Union (EU) are imperative. These could in turn trigger infrastructural changes in national and pan-European registries, cancer management guidelines (e.g., frequency of routine radiologic restaging, inclusion of patient-reported outcomes), and the health data space, to ensure conformity with declared standards and facilitate extraction of RWD sets (including patient-level data) suitable for approval and pricing with minimal effort. For an EU-wide unification of precision cancer medicine, collective negotiation of drug supply contracts and funding solidarity would additionally be required to handle the financial burden. According to experience from pivotal European programs, off-label use could potentially also be harmonized across EU-states to accelerate availability of novel drugs, streamline collection of valuable RWD, and mitigate related costs through wider partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.

Sowing Wheat and Other Merits: The First "Black Conquistador" of the Mexican Field

Through a close reading of the rhetoric, structure, and context of the Probanza de méritos of Juan Garrido (1538), this article repositions an African-born servant who made himself indispensable to the Mexican Conquest(s). I argue that Garrido developed a hybrid identity that allowed him to live not on the fringe of the Ibero-Atlantic world, but rather as an imperial agent operating at the heart of the expanding empire. Tracing how probanzas deploy rhetoric to engage in individual and collective negotiations with the Crown, demonstrating the bridge from a feudal society to an early modern state, I explore how Garrido may have understood the impact of "race" in his petition and thus reconsider blackness itself in the context of sixteenth-century colonial Mexico. Ultimately, I recast how we understand experiences of Afrodescendants in the conquest of the Americas, and how their own relationship with royal authorities reveals their agency.

On (Educational) Justice in the Context of Digital Collective Negotiation Processes on Sustainable Development

Der Beitrag befragt den Konnex und die Interdependenz von Nachhaltigkeit, Digitalität und (Bildungs-)Gerechtigkeit grundlagentheoretisch und diskutiert auf Basis medienpädagogischer Perspektiven Konsequenzen für kollektive Aushandlungsprozesse zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung. Im Zentrum steht die Frage nach den Wesenszügen der drei relational zu denkenden Begriffe und welche Konsequenzen aus dieser Konstellation für die Gestaltung gerechter und nachhaltiger Bildungserfahrungen in einer Kultur der Digitalität resultieren. Es werden drei Topografien entwickelt, die unterschiedliche Akzentuierungen des Konnexes von Digitalität, Nachhaltigkeit und Bildungsgerechtigkeit vornehmen. Hinsichtlich der kontrovers diskutierten Begriffsbestimmungen von Gerechtigkeit und Nachhaltigkeit werden Grundpositionen systematisch entfaltet und die aus diesen Positionen zu ziehenden Konsequenzen für den Konnex und die Interdependenz skizziert. Insbesondere wird das Spannungsverhältnis von Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit verhandelt und es wird die Schwierigkeit der Bestimmung diskutiert, was Nachhaltigkeit sei unter dem Einbezug der Konzepte der schwachen und der starken Nachhaltigkeit. Die Argumentation kulminiert in der These, die Nutzung digitaler Medien und ihrer Infrastrukturen für Nachhaltigkeit und Gerechtigkeit auf ein notwendiges Minimum zu begrenzen und in diesem Rahmen so viele Kontexte für Medienbildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung wie nötig zu schaffen.

Data Cooperative: Enabling Meaningful Collective Negotiation of Data Rights for Communities

Data Cooperative: Enabling Meaningful Collective Negotiation of Data Rights for Communities

A Preliminary Study on the Programmatic Module Construction of Collective Negotiation

A Preliminary Study on the Programmatic Module Construction of Collective Negotiation

Open Documentary Platforms Enabling Forms of Democratization and Community Experience

In recent years, there has been an increase in open documentary projects on the web providing platforms for those affected by social problems to tell their stories. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, they gained significance as collaborative projects responding to pressing questions. They offered virtual spaces for community interaction and the interactive negotiation of meanings and perceptions of reality as face-to-face interactions on the ground became unfeasible. As networks of mutual support in times of uncertainty, they responded to the various needs of many people worldwide and avoided a hierarchical approach in favor of participatory, partly dialogical practices and a polyphonic form of presentation. This makes them compelling examples for discussing the democratic potentials and social-communicative functions of interactivity on such documentary platforms. This contribution analyzes two documentary projects: Corona Haikus (initiated by Sandra Gaudenzi and Sandra Tabares-Duque, 2020), launched as a Facebook group for visual poetry referring to the reality of the lockdowns and documenting the experiences during isolation, and Corona Diaries (initiated by Francesca Panetta et al., 2020), a database for voice recordings. The paper argues that interactivity in the two examples, first of all, fosters democratic processes on the level of production and decision-making processes as well as on the level of meaning construction; further – as an adjacent claim – the contribution suggests that the projects as complex assemblages allowed for the experience of virtual communities. By combining material and praxeological analyses and drawing on approaches from political theory, philosophy, and social sciences in addition to the media studies-oriented analyses, the paper identifies the transformative dimension of collaborative interactive documentaries, especially in times of crisis. Despite different medial approaches with additional advantages – visual poetry that encourages reflection and intimate voice recordings that enable effectively attentive listening –both platforms function as a medial in-between that enables collective identification and solidarity forms. The difference between Corona Haikus and Corona Diaries is: that Corona Haikus uses the democratic potentials of the interactive communication network for collective negotiations of meanings, dialogue, and co-creation, while Corona Diaries focuses more on low participation thresholds for a – in terms of content – highly open space, which in turn does not allow for interactions among the participants. What the projects have in common is that the active participation in the open space without the classical hierarchies between professional media makers and subjects, the collective narrative processes, and the sharing of emotions can lead to the feeling of being part of a developing community, which in turn can help individual participants to cope with their experiences. Additionally, the nonlinear, polyphonic platforms open up new perspectives and relations not seen before. Another result of the paper is that future research should differentiate more nuancedly between forms of participation rather than arguing based on an artificial distinction between interactivity and participation.

Share, don’t shop: exploring value, sociality and the ‘alternative’ at clothing swaps

Since the 2000s, second-hand clothing consumption has increased rapidly in acceptability, visibility and fashion-ability in the UK. Diversifying from informal, domestic sites like charity shops and car-boot fairs, second-hand channels now include more formalised, profit-driven retail spheres, including vintage boutiques, chain stores and online marketplaces. Clothes swaps are perhaps less visible due to their informality and ad-hoc organisation. However, within local communities swaps have begun to proliferate- from student union free-for-alls, to swap parties, to ‘gender swap’ events for trans people- and there is now at least one dedicated clothes swapping app, Nuw. This essay analyses the growing activity of clothes swapping as material-cultural practice. Drawing on interdisciplinary theories spanning cultural geography, anthropology and feminist theory, I explore three case studies in Norwich, UK. Exploring different types of swaps allows a wider view of swapping practices; the interplay of space, exchange and sociality; and the diverse journeys or ‘flows’ which garments take as ‘mobile’ matter, rather than merely the accumulated possession of individuals (Gregson and Beale 2004, p.692). Since clothing enables exploration of the self, I consider how swaps sustain collective negotiations of identity and style. At private swaps, for example, clothing’s inalienability from previous wearers can prove problematic, blurring boundaries between self and other, whereas at public swaps, the opportunity to experiment with style can be liberating. Finally, I examine swapping’s relationship to wider fashion systems, both dependent on and undermining first-hand consumption. Participants’ attitudes and motivations often imply opposition to mainstream fashion, though this is complicated by the flow of clothing into swaps and the volume of their clothing acquisition. Nevertheless, in circumventing the pressures and ethical issues of the fashion industry, swappers may find space in which to question and challenge dominant modes of consumption.