Room For Negotiation Research Articles

Tips on How to Confront Others—When You Must

Draw a cartoon of yourself in a confrontation. Has the blood rushed to your face or drained from it? Do your nostrils flare? Is your mouth narrow and tight? Are your hands curled into fists or arms crossed protectively across your chest? This exercise opened Erin Fischer's workshop “Building a Bridge in Stilettos” at the Women's Leadership Institute on Amelia Island FL in December. She is director of training services at The Leadership Institute: Women with Purpose, a non-profit organized by Alpha Gamma Delta to develop women leaders. The “bridge” concept refers to the need to bridge a potential threat to the relationship. Most women (and some men) hate to confront. We're people pleasers who avoid conflict, which makes us feel icky. We don't want to hurt feelings or be considered unkind. Thinking the situation will resolve itself or the student employee will graduate, we don't want to invest the time and energy. Confrontation is exhausting. But when a problem arises, a failure to confront can be costly. The offending person won't improve without feedback. The bad situation continues and snowballs. Other staff lose respect for the supervisor, whose blood pressure continues to rise. Hissy fits and tears of anger don't help. Knots in the stomach spoil the appetite. Shouting matches let off steam but rarely resolve a problem. Learning how to manage a confrontation can improve your relationships on and off campus. Fischer had participants complete an assessment form to identify their dominant confrontational styles, then gather in three different parts of the room according to style. She asked each group to write a one-sentence definition of their style, identify a well-known public figure who uses that style and offer tips for confronting someone who shares their style. When useful: This approach can be useful in an emergency, when a decision must be made quickly or when policy rules leave no room for negotiation or compromise. Tips for dealing with them: Be prepared, honest and direct. Recognize the time factors underlying a push for speed. Understand that people with this style have value and emotions, which they process internally rather than using words. When useful: This approach can help when emotions are running high and everyone needs a break. It helps to level the playing field when you have far more power in a situation than the person you're confronting. It also works well for minor issues that aren't worth the battle. Tips for dealing with them: Validate a reflexive person by your words and body language, acknowledging her feelings. Listen well. She may not want to be looked in the eye. When useful: Self-assured confrontation is appropriate in most day-to-day situations. Use it when you have experience with a topic and you are trying to coach others. Tips for dealing with them: Be action oriented, honest and concise. Bring a suggested plan but also an open mind, ready to finalize the solution together. Take responsibility for your actions. Effective confrontation builds a bridge between you and the other person, and to a better future in solving problems. Erin Fischer: efischer@tliwwp.org or 317-566-2159

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects. Management, Partnerships and Effects in the Netherlands and the UK

Why Sacred Lands Are Not Indivisible: The Cognitive Foundations of Sacralising Land

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Numerous political analysts have argued that conflicts over sacred land are intractable. These scholars maintain that sacred lands are psychologically perceived as indivisible, or alternatively, in the sociological tradition, their indivisibility is a social fact. Moreover, religious beliefs are viewed as stagnant and resistant to change. Consequently, resolving such conflicts is fraught with difficulty, and even if a truce could be imposed, it would be unstable and violence would eventually erupt. A cognitive and evolutionary account offers a less pessimistic view. Individuals do not conceive of sacred lands in the same way that they conceive of sacred space, such as cemeteries or houses of worship, or sacred objects, such as holy water or prayer beads. Unlike sacred space and objects, whose boundaries are clearly defined, conceptions of sacred land are typically abstract and may bear little resemblance to the contested physical land. While abstract notions of sacred land are indivisible and must remain intact, the physical land is not indivisible, and therefore there is often greater room for negotiation of sacred lands than is generally appreciated.</span>

Ngugi wa Thiong'o in/and 2006

xile is exit in excess; exit is also homecoming's traumatic co-traveler. Move- ment within the geography and the psyche postulates exclusionary position- ing of place and identity. What does the place of arrival contain, asks the migrant? What does it expect from me? How do I handle my past, my memory? Is there room for negotiations? Experiencing exile and living it distract and refract the subject. The pressure from the outside is internalized. How many times has not a migrant or exilic person or (as here) writer been asked the question: When do you plan to go home? or are you, really?—meaning, do you subscribe to domesticity or alterity? Are you one of us or do you persist in being an alien? Most writers in intellectual exile, voluntary or not, realize with sadness that ques- tions such as these are part of the adopted territory's conservative nurturing of the One and Only, whether we define it as Nation, Language, Literature, Religion, or Family-all written large. Isolation or alienation has a price. Confronting such questions, the writer often fumbles with the words, not knowing what to say or how to legitimate his/her role playing; as a writer in disguise speaking/writing (also literally) in many tongues. For many emigres exile becomes a performance that hosts a whole spectrum of hybrid identity markers: nostalgia for home, anger, duplicity, self-reproach, mourning, but also an incisive sense and recognition of what it is to be a global citizen. These are some general meditations that foreground this essay about Ngugi wa Thiong'o in what I call sustained performative exile in the US, as it materialized during the single year of 2006. Who is he then? A Kenyan writer in voluntary or nonvoluntary exile in the West; the writer of Murogi wa Kagogo or The Wizard of the Crow, his latest novel that appeared in Gikuyu in May (in parts; three out of six) and in English in August; a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California at Irvine; Director of UC Irvine's International Center for Writing and Translation; an emigre writer, one of the many postcolonial nomads

Jones v. Harris Associates L.P.: The Search for Investor Protection Continues...

Mutual fund investors have been and continue to be without representation in the fee negotiation room. This should come as no surprise since a mutual fund is the creation of its adviser. As a result, mutual fund advisers are handsomely rewarded to the point of excess. This article discusses the conflicted nature of the mutual fund structure, traces the development of law directed at remedying the problems faced by investors, and offers a new approach that is tailored to correct the shortcomings of the industry.

Beijing's 2007 political reform plan and prospects for Hong Kong's democratization

In the September 2008 Legislative Council election, Hong Kong's democrats managed to retain their veto position in the political reform process. Now, the democrats face the dilemma of what to do with Beijing's 2007 plan for Hong Kong's democratization. According to the plan, the people of Hong Kong could see the direct election of the chief executive and the entire legislature in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Although the plan is not perfect, Hong Kong's pan-democratic camp may need to adopt a negotiated approach, given the current political reality and the balance of power between local democrats and Beijing. It is suggested here that there is room for negotiation in the latter's reform plan. If some moderate democrats are willing to pursue a negotiated strategy, Beijing's political reform plan for Hong Kong stands a significant chance of being approved. Recent developments in Hong Kong indicate that such a prospect could indeed materialize.

The discursive construction of multiple identities of the Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers of Greece

This paper addresses the complex issue of negotiating identity among minority speakers of Albanian in modern Greece as surrounded by and interacting with major societal forces and dominant ideologies stemming from the Greek nation-state. Some of the theoretical questions related to the very concept of identity are also discussed. The major thrust of the paper is focused on a discursive construction of a shifting identity formation on the part of minority community members who often anchor their identities by means of an indexical machinery rather than by explicit propositional self-identification. This means that, even though they frequently label themselves Albanian (Arvanitika) speakers and foreground various kinds of symbolic contrasts to the dominant culture and ethnicity, they also perform an identity by referring to themselves as “we” which allows more room for negotiation and for the blurring of rigid boundaries that are frequently erected around an ethnolinguistic group in our analytical jargon. I argue that this identity management is to be expected in conditions of late modernity in which no schemes, modes of existence, and ideological views are taken for granted, and in which one has to cope with challenges emerging from macro-centers of control. In such a process reflexivity at the local level looms large questioning the inherited understandings of this and related phenomena as easily classifiable sociologically and sociolinguistically.

Ambitious Health Reform Plans Take Shape in Senate

Ambitious Health Reform Plans Take Shape in Senate

The future of combating climate change: how to share the burden among countries? A Swiss perspective

I would like to contribute to the ongoing discussion on this topic by adding two elements. Firstly, it might be interesting to shed some light on how another small country – Switzerland – tackles the issue of climate change. Secondly, it is useful to remember at all times that it is in the negotiation room itself, where– regardless of all the statements by governments or by scientists outside of that room – the decisions on a future climate regime will finally be taken. What are the conditions to be met for a breakthrough at the Copenhagen conference to be held in December 2009 under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)?

Zola Award Winner: "I Ain't Had Much Schooling": The Ritual of the Examination and the Social Construction of Impairment

In this article, Rembis uses case files and other records from the state training school for girls in Geneva, Illinois, as well as published studies of female juvenile delinquents, to analyze the psychological evaluation of inmates from the perspective of both female experts and their female subjects. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, experts conducting research at Geneva consistently argued that an overwhelmingly high percentage of its inmates were "feebleminded" or "mentally defective." Analyzing the testing that occurred at Geneva reveals not only the importance of eugenics and other psy discourses in the construction of mental "defect," but also the contestation, negotiation, and redefinition that undergirded the formation of historically contingent definitions of impairment. Many disability theorists and activists have viewed impairment as a prediscursive state of being, as politically neutral, given, natural, and timeless. As this article shows impairment is not ahistorical. It too has a history, a genealogy. The ritual of modern psychological examination was a critical new modality of power that greatly affected the lives of its subjects; the examiner observed, measured, recorded, defined, and treated, all through a process in which power relations between scientist and subject were far from equal, but the ritual of the exam did afford its subjects some room for negotiation and redefinition. Young women incarcerated at Geneva actively participated in the examination and in the formation of their own individuality, and in some cases affected not only their own lived experience, but also dominant perceptions of "mental defect" and eugenic commitment.

North Korean Newsbriefs

The Sixth Round of the Six-Party TalksNorth Korea shut down its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in July 2007 and began disablement of its three facilities in exchange for energy aid, political guarantees, and normalized relations with the United States. This came after the 13 February sixparty agreement, which entitles the impoverished Stalinist state to receive 950,000 tons of heavy fuel oil or its equivalent, so long as certain conditions are met. The events of July were followed by U.S.-North Korea talks in August, a bilateral working group meeting in Geneva from 1 to 2 September, and the 2 to 4 October sixDuksung party talks in Beijing. The latter laid out a timetable of 31 December for disablement in the tentative six-party accord, Second-Phase Actions for the Implementation of the Joint Statement, announced on 3 October. A team of U.S. nuclear experts arrived in North Korea on 1 November and began monitoring disablement of the Yongbyon nuclear facilities four days later.The Bush administration is now pursuing a more reconciliatory foreign policy of engagement with Pyongyang, having vaguely promised in Geneva to begin the process of delisting North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism upon its completing the disablement process and providing a full declaration of all nuclear programs by the end of 2007. If North Korea is removed from the U.S. list of terror-sponsoring states, the poverty-stricken will be eligible for large multilateral financial aid, including loans from the World Bank. North Korea has completed phase one of the February agreement by shutting down the Yongbyon reactor complex; phase two consists of declaring and permanently disabling all nuclear facilities, which is ongoing as of this writing; and the third phase, complete dismantlement of all nuclear programs and facilities, is set for the end of 2008. The possibility of a sudden reversal in U.S.-North Korea policy cannot be ruled out, however.According to an unnamed senior U.S. official quoted in Chosun Ilbo in October, delisting North Korea as a sponsor would take a considerable amount of time to actually implement. Furthermore, it would require Congressional approval. Hardliners representing contending political factions in Washington, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, who are committed to the rightwing doctrine of regime change, as carried out in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, have criticized engagement and raised allegations about North Korea providing nuclear assistance to Syria, an ally of Iran. These accusations followed an apparently unprovoked Israeli air raid on Syrian targets on 6 September. North Korea has provided missile technology to Syria, but both countries strongly denied any nuclear connection.The Japanese government also expressed opposition to delisting North Korea, citing the abduction issue. On 9 October, Tokyo extended by six months trade sanctions originally imposed in 2006 after the North Korean nuclear test. This decision has strained U.S.-Japan bilateral ties and the alliance in the war on terror to some extent, complicated subsequently by Japanese suspension in November of fuel to U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, an action taken in response to the Democratic Party of Japan, which refused to support enabling legislation in the Diet. Popular hostility in Japan to the U.S.-led war on terror is another factor. Tokyo maintains that North Korea kidnapped seventeen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies. Thirteen were accounted for and five repatriated to Japan in 2002. Pyongyang, considering the matter closed, maintains that the remaining eight are dead and there are no more Japanese abductees in the country. The agreements thus brokered between the U.S. and North Korea have, in spite of their apparent tenuousness, opened some room for negotiations between the leaders of the two Koreas.Joint Document of the Second Session of the Sixth Round of the Six-Party TalksA joint document, named the Second-Phase Actions for the Implementation of the Joint Statement, was released on October 3, 2007, after a two-day recess of the second session of the sixth round of the six-party talks. …

Provider-Patient Boundaries at End of Life: How Close Is Too Close?

Provider-Patient Boundaries at End of Life: How Close Is Too Close?

“I'm Not an Immigrant!”: Resistance, Redefinition, and the Role of Resources in Identity Work

In this paper we examine the identity negotiation processes of North African immigrant women in France. Participants engaged in various forms of identity work, including selective association and management of appearance, as well as resisting others' attempts to categorize them as immigrants. Given that these women have chosen to move to France and remain there, this finding is surprising. Using the concept of the Not-Me identity, we explore how people can redefine and refuse labels that seem to be self-evident and to lack room for negotiation. At the same time, we examine how class and educational resources and other structural factors influence these immigrant women's ability to control others' perceptions of their identity.

Land tenure, agroforestry adoption, and reduction of fire hazard in a forest zone: A case study from Lampung, Sumatra, Indonesia

Clear land ownership and community involvement in managing forests are key determinants in securing sustainable land management. A recent study in Lampung in the province of Sumatra, Indonesia revealed that, even with the use of military force, forest policy and management has largely failed to protect forest resources when local communities were not involved. In contrast, with less government intervention but more secure land rights (as perceived by farmers), local communities have successfully rehabilitated degraded land, including that designated as state forest area, through establishment of coffee based agroforestry. The main incentive for local communities to manage land more sustainably was the expectation of secure land rights on state forest land through which livelihood and income could be realized. The study indicated that under such circumstances there is room for negotiation between the government forestry department and local communities to better manage state forest land. This not only can generate income for local communities but can also improve the overall environment through reduction of fire incidence. This indicates that legal land use rights for local communities on state forest land could be used as a ‘reward’ for upland farmers for their role in maintaining environmental services of forest land.

Change Management—Strategy and Values in Six Agencies from the Australian Public Service

Change is a ubiquitous theme in management literature, but empirical studies that seek to draw lessons from the experience of managing change are rare. By investigating patterns of change management in six Australian federal agencies, we elicit a number of factors contributing to success—though “success” is itself not a clear‐cut concept in this area. We found support for a number of broad themes already apparent in the literature and suggest that change processes that have the support of the workforce require good leadership, an appropriate model of change, some room for negotiation and compromise, and well‐planned communication.

Mobilizing meanings of mobility: car users’ constructions of the goods and bads of car use

When car users’ are questioned about the advantages and disadvantages of car use the focus should not be on what they say, but on how they present their arguments to the interviewer. This paper shows such arguments can differ in kind. Swedish car users present the advantages––such as ‘time-saving’––by referring to personal and direct experience. The disadvantages are of two kinds. Some are related to direct experience, such as ‘costs’. Some are made credible by reference to public discourse, notably ‘environmental degradation’. This indicates that the facts about the advantages and environmental impacts are constructed in different ways. Facts about the advantages and some of the disadvantages are constructed in a direct and unreflexive way, situated in practical actions, and leave little room for negotiation. Facts about environmental impacts are constructed by others in a distanced and reflexive process, situated in laboratories, etc. Car users adopt these facts through various media. While the arguments on the advantages of car use are presented as unquestionable and absolute, scientific facts about the negative effects of car use are presented as relative and negotiable. This should be seen as a possible explanation why people do not reduce their own car use, although they say that car use in general ought to be limited.

Rocket poker over the hegemony in East Asia: Chinese security policy in the era of American missile defense plans

Since the United States withdrew from the ABM treaty on December 13, 2001, China has come under pressure. The deployment of a tactical missile defense in Taiwan could possibly encourage the will for independence on that island. A strategic missile defense system would neutralize China's ability to respond to a nuclear attack from the US. One can expect China to react with a massive build-up of missiles and nuclear weapons. Nonetheless there is still room for negotiations to succeed.