The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  Systems must also be readied. Research has shown that unless schools and districts are sufficiently motivated to embrace a change initiative such as instituting a program of conflict resolution training, it is likely to fail. This readiness must exist for a majority of the system, including regents, board members, superintendents, principals, teachers, other professional staff, students, and parents. One method for assessing organizational readiness in schools was used in the Learning Communities Project initiated by the New York City Resolving Conflict Creatively Program (Roderick, 1998). For a school to be included in the project, 70 percent or more of the faculty must vote in favor of its implementation. This approach could be taken for entire school districts or even for statewide school initiatives. Administrators and conflict practitioners need to work to develop innovative methods of assessing and fostering readiness throughout these and other systems.

  Finally, awareness of constructive responses to conflict needs to be widespread among the general population. One way of attaining this is for the field to attempt educating prestigious individuals in high-profile positions within a given society. In 1995, a campaign was initiated in Australia through the leadership of the nationwide Conflict Resolution Network (CRN), which sought to influence the campaign process of local, state, and federal elections in that country. Their basic objective was to ensure high-level political dialogue by encouraging the candidates to adopt an orientation to issues, not insults; dialogue, not debate; and collaboration, not confrontation. Immediate response to the campaign was very positive, with 32 percent of candidates for their House of Representatives committing to the CRN conflict-resolving principles. In the United States, the League of Women Voters has been doing important work in promoting its Code of Fair Campaign Practices, which requires candidates for public office to commit to uphold basic principles of decency, honesty, and fair play.

  These efforts hope to foster a new type of political process and a government that models respect, care, and common sense in addressing the issues, conflicts, and visions of the people it represents. A general shift in attitude and response to conflict could come about if those in influential positions of high visibility (political leaders; sports, entertainment, and media celebrities; and business leaders) were to model constructive strategies and skills.

  Change Agents

  Third, How can we help people in the field of conflict resolution understand and develop skills in their roles as change agents?

  The field is increasingly aware of the fact that conflict professionals often have to act as change agents within the systems in which they work. Whether intervening in a professional relationship, a family, an organization, a community, or a nation, you will find it useful to think about conflict resolution systemically. This has two implications, one practical and one political. The practical concerns the need to broaden understanding of what we do. Much of the emphasis of past work in the field has been on training conflict specialists in the skills of getting disputants to the table, facilitating a constructive process, and reaching an agreement. However, there is increasing recognition of the problems that occur in implementation, both in helping to ensure that disputants can effectively implement their agreements and implementing effective mediation and training programs within larger systems.

  In the case of disputes between individuals, it is not uncommon for good agreements to fall apart because of problems with implementation or changes that occur after the agreement is made. Conflict specialists need to be better trained to help disputants anticipate future problems and build in feedback mechanisms so that if problems occur with implementation, the disputants will attempt to resolve them collaboratively or return to the table to work them out.

  Considerable challenges can also occur in implementing mediation or training programs within systems. There is increasing recognition of the difficulties of implementing any lasting change in systems with regard to dispute resolution mechanisms and the need to identify the processes and conditions that give rise to successful implementation. Introducing cooperation and conflict resolution concepts and practices into systems often involves, in a sense, a paradigm shift in how people see and approach differences. Fostering this type of fundamental change in the norms and practices of a system requires that conflict specialists have the necessary skills to motivate and persuade, organize, mobilize, and institutionalize the change. These skills need to be adequately integrated into the training of conflict specialists who work in systems, particularly complex ones.

  The second implication of defining our work in terms of change concerns the conflict resolver’s level of awareness of the political repercussions of his or her work. Intervening in part of any system in some way affects the whole system. If one department in an organization undergoes a substantial change in how it functions, this is likely to have an impact on the entire organization. It is therefore important for the intervener to be informed about the political context in which she or he works and to be aware that the intervention has a likely impact on the balance of power existing within the system.

  This is both a moral and a practical obligation. In The Promise of Mediation (1994), Bush and Folger discussed this issue under the heading “The Oppression Story” of mediation. They argued that in some settings, mediation can serve to oppress those in low power by masking patterns of injustice within systems or allowing those in high power to set the agenda and intimidate others. Conflict specialists must be trained to think in terms of the social and political processes within organizations and reflect critically on their own role in the power dynamics within institutions so that they can work fairly and effectively. Furthermore, the moral obligation of the conflict specialist extends beyond understanding his or her impact on power dynamics and toward undoing systemic injustices that may exist.

  The Importance of Cultural Differences

  The fourth challenging issue is, How can our growing recognition of the importance of cultural differences be used to improve the practice of constructive conflict resolution and help develop practical theories in this area that are universally valid?

  Most scientific theories and models of practice have the laudable aim of being universally true. Theorists commonly assume that the basic ideas in the theories related to cooperation and competition, equity theory, social judgment, communication, self-control, persuasion, and so on are as applicable to, say, the aborigines in Kakadu as to Park Avenue sophisticates, to people living in caves as well as to astronauts. However, most theories are developed in particular societies with their particular cultures, gender roles, and other characteristics that are often invisible to the theoreticians.

  Theorists often do not articulate their assumptions about the relations between the theory and the social context in which it is to be applied. Does a theory developed in the United States implicitly assume that the social context is one in which there is a market economy and individualistic values are strongly held? If so, it may be applicable only in social contexts similar to the ones in which it was developed. There is a strong need for the field of conflict resolution, and the social sciences generally, to better articulate explicitly aspects and assumptions about the social context that are understood as relevant to theories.

  Even if the basic ideas of a theory are applicable in a variety of social contexts, specific implementation of its ideas always depends on the characteristics of the social context in which they are applied. Thus, effective implementation of many of the theoretical ideas in this book depends on whether a practitioner is working in a social context (such as the American one) that is predominantly individualistic, has low power distances, is strongly task oriented, has low uncertainty avoidance, and is more masculine and modern or in a social context that differs significantly on any of these dimensions.

  In general, scholars and practitioners can respond to these concerns in several ways. First, it is important that both scholars and practitioners be aware of their own gendered, cultural, and societal mind-
sets with regard to their work (see Fisher, 1988). Some degree of mindfulness of our own biases and assumptions can help us examine our theories, models, and practices for similar biases and make them explicit.

  Second, a significant amount of work has been conducted in the past few decades on identifying the psychological dimensions on which people differ due to variations in culture, ethnicity, religion, and gender (summarized in chapter 25; see also Hofstede, 1980; Kolb and Coolidge, 1991; Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Segall, Lonner, and Berry, 1998). Conflict specialists working cross-culturally need to be informed about these dimensions and be mindful of how they affect the way people make meaning in conflict situations.

  Third, scholars and practitioners need to better distinguish those elements of conflict resolution that are universal and therefore applicable across cultures from those that are not. For example, Deutsch (in chapter 1 in this Handbook) has suggested that specific values such as reciprocity and nonviolence universally occur in enduring, voluntary, and significant relations of cooperation and constructive conflict resolution. The cross-cultural universality of the linkage between such values and constructive conflict resolution is different from the culturally specific usefulness of certain prescribed processes (such as recommendations to “separate the people from the problem,” openly express one’s needs, or take an analytical approach to understanding the issues); these are likely to vary considerably across cultures, gender, class, and so on.

  Lederach (1995) has suggested practicing an “elicitive” approach when offering conflict resolution training across cultures. He argues that “prescriptive” approaches to training, which view the trainer as the expert and participants as passive recipients of predetermined knowledge, models, and skills, are often inappropriate in many cultures. Lederach advocates an approach in which the context expertise of the participants is emphasized and combined with the process and content expertise of the trainer, so that the trainer and the participants together create a new model of constructive conflict resolution that is specifically suited to the resources and constraints of the particular social context in which the participants are embedded.

  Conflict within the Field of Conflict Resolution

  Fifth, given the existence of much conflict in the field of conflict resolution (as among the scholarly disciplines, among theorists, researchers, and practitioners; and among training programs and graduate studies for scarce resources—students, clients, grants, and so on), How can the field learn to better walk its talk and model how conflicts can be resolved constructively?

  The field of conflict resolution has become, ironically, a fairly competitive arena. This competition and the resulting conflict between individuals, disciplines, programs, and institutions pose substantial challenges to progress in our field.

  For example, the various scholarly disciplines often approach conflict from contrasting perspectives. Take a dispute over water rights between two neighboring tribal groups. A social psychologist is first concerned with the characteristics of the parties, their prior relationship, the strategies and tactics they use in the dispute, their respective needs in the situation, escalatory dynamics, and so on. A legal scholar working in this area is concerned with prior treaties or contracts, land rights, the existence of legal precedents, and so on. A scholar of international affairs may be oriented to contextual or structural factors such as the balance of power in the dispute or the national or regional sources and implications of the conflict. Scholars from anthropology, business, history, and economics may emphasize still other aspects of the situation.

  At one level, these orientations are due simply to the varieties of educational training and task orientation. At a deeper level, however, beneath many of the disciplinary contrasts are ideological and value differences. If conflict is believed to exist within a unitary ideological frame (where society is seen as an integrated whole in which the interests of the individual and society are one) as opposed to a radical frame (in which antagonistic class interests are seen as comprising society), it requires one kind of response and not another. Similarly, whether one’s primary orientation to conflict is competitive or cooperative dictates strategy.

  These and other variations in how conflict is understood and approached typically come into conflict themselves when scholars or practitioners attempt to work together. Because many of the significant conflicts that societies face are rooted in political, economic, and social histories and are fueled by social psychological dynamics, we are finding that analysis and resolution cannot be adequately conducted from any one disciplinary perspective; a multidisciplinary framework is required. But the traditional reward systems and orientations of the disciplines lessen the chances for such an approach. Combining traditional disciplinary paradigms and methodologies with multidisciplinary ones is a daunting task, though an essential one if the field of conflict resolution is to offer effective solutions to some of the world’s most perplexing problems.

  At another level, there is concern in the field of conflict resolution over the substantial gap between theory and practice. As Deutsch notes in the Introduction, many practitioners of conflict resolution dismiss (or are simply unaware of) the contributions of theorists and researchers, particularly if the research challenges their own opinions or methods. At the same time, scholars often fail to use the expertise of highly skilled practitioners in their development of theory, and research designs often fail to take into account what practitioners and policymakers want or need to know. In fact, an evaluation of the eighteen, mostly university-based Hewlett Theory Centers found that the work of most practitioners surveyed was largely unaffected by the important contributions generated by the various centers (theory, publications, and so forth). At the same time, much of the research conducted at these centers was found to be “removed from practice realities and constraints.” This lack of effective collaboration between scholars and practitioners hinders the development of the field and is a significant loss for both scholars and practitioners.

  There exists an interesting problem when trying to enhance the connections between theory and practice. It is embodied in this Handbook, which is geared more toward the scholarly, academic modes (learning through reading) than the practice mode (learning through doing). The issue is, How can we foster the growth of knowledge in this field by using more practical modalities? We have made efforts on two fronts in this regard. One way we have done so in this Handbook is by asking those trained in the knowledge aspects of conflict, but whose work lies primarily in its practice, to contribute chapters (see, for example, Burke; Bunker and Coleman; Marcus; Coleman and Prywes; Honeyman; and Bartoli, Manojlovic, and Magellan). Although the balance is not equal, we have sought an even greater contribution from the practice side in this third edition. A second way we have sought to strengthen the linkage is that we have asked contributors to devote a section of each chapter to the implications of their contributions to the arena of practice.

  A curious and related matter concerns the distinction between knowledge and skill in the area of conflict resolution. Unlike other scholarly areas, we in the field of conflict studies have all experienced conflicts: within ourselves, with other people, within and between groups we belong to, and so forth. That is, we have more skill practice than theoretical knowledge in both well-resolved and poorly resolved conflicts. So even the most scholarly oriented conflict student continues to have many opportunities to increase her skill by practicing with the very concepts she is studying. This is less likely to be the case in other areas of scholarship (e.g., the study of comparative political systems). In other words, there is more of an inherent connection between theory and practice in the conflict field. Furthermore, as our understanding of conflict phenomena increases in both knowledge and practice, it becomes ever more important to find ways of cross-fertilizing these: theory-informed practice and practice-informed theorizing.

  The field will be well served if we work harder at practicing what we preach and learn to wor
k together to resolve the conflicts that exist across orientations, organizations, and disciplines and between theory and practice. There is much strength in the diversity of our field, but we must come together to realize it.

  Learning to Learn

  The sixth challenge is, How can we learn to learn about our methods and practice?

  The field of conflict resolution has been criticized for being broad but not deep. The issue is whether work in this area is both based on sound theoretical thinking and systematically studied and evaluated in a manner that allows the field to grow. We believe this volume attests to the rich theoretical foundations of the field. However, much of the practice of conflict resolution is not evaluated, or poorly evaluated. This is a lost opportunity to learn from our collective work, understand the conditions under which certain tactics and strategies are more or less effective, and build on what is effective and discard what is not. This type of research is still uncommon despite its increase in the past ten years. (See chapter 44.) Systematic evaluation of conflict resolution practices needs to be conceptualized and implemented at the onset of intervention, not as an afterthought. Additionally, there would be much benefit from longitudinal studies examining the long-term effects of training and mediation programs.

  Recognizing Our Global Cooperative Interdependence