Negotiation as a Post-Modern Process

Editors ’ Note: What do negotiation teachers think negotiation is all about? Fox says it’s time for us all to adapt to a wide range of phe-nomena which are not yet on the minds of negotiators or their teach-ers. These include globalization, better understanding of the intractability of some conflicts, and transfer of knowledge from very specific contexts such as hostage negotiation into general use, among others. Together they demonstrate that even though we don’t recog-nize it, we have an ideology, one that warrants rethinking from front to back. Conventional pedagogy treats negotiation as a strategic and instru-mental process. With few exceptions, students are currently taught that the negotiator’s central challenge is learning how to develop and enact rational strategies to claim and/or create maximum value that satisfy the negotiator’s (or her principal’s) self-interest. This way of thinking opens a world of possibilities for developing diag-nostic, analytic and predictive tools for negotiators. We study brain functions (Tom et al. 2007), cognition (Birke and Fox 1999), behav-ioral and games theories (Bolt and Houba 2002), and more, all geared toward a better understanding of our own internal thought processes and those of our counterparts; how to “game ” the process of interaction between negotiators; and how to achieve better out-comes for ourselves and our clients. This way of thinking also pro-vides a useful framework for how to organize our negotiation teaching. First generation negotiation pedagogy is built on this con-ceptual framework. Kenneth H. Fox is an associate professor and director of graduate and un-dergraduate conflict studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and