Preface to the Negotiator's Desk Reference
Chris Honeyman and Andrea Kupfer Schneider, Editors
The path to this book has been a long one. For our entire careers, we have been fascinated by the sheer variety of forms and specialties which together make up negotiation theory and practice. Gradually, however, we realized that the expertise base of practitioners and scholars across our sprawling field had become deep enough and varied enough that not one person was really looking at the whole picture.
We formed the Canon of Negotiation Initiative (www.convenor.com/canon-of-negotiation.html) in 2003, initially to see if there was a substantial quantity of research that might be applicable beyond the domain (law, public policy, business and international relations, at first) that had originated each piece. The first venture was a small conference, of roughly twenty "second-generation" scholars and practitioners--handpicked to combine the most subject-matter breadth possible within that number, along with the requisite depth of knowledge. The result was a full special issue of the Marquette Law Review (Vol. 108/2, Spring 2004), with two dozen articles.
This experiment generated interest among more than a few colleagues. (In a telling sign that we were on to something, at least in the eyes of one major user group, that edition of the law review also became one of the most excerpted and cited single issues on negotiation of any law journal in the U.S.) These articles outlined research, ideas and practical experience that had originated from legal, business, international relations and urban planning professionals, and that were increasingly known in their original domain. Yet every one of these subjects had, up to that point, failed to cross over in any meaningful degree into any of the other domains we were studying.
Devising The Negotiator's Fieldbook
At that point we realized that if one venture on a twenty-scholar scale could find this much scholarship ripe for cross-disciplinary use, there might be considerably more such material--if we could engage a larger variety of scholars and practitioners in looking for it. So in 2004-2005 we organized sixteen panels, at four of the major conferences in different sectors of the field, including the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution; Law & Society Association; International Association for Conflict Management, and Association for Conflict Resolution. This time, our gambit was to challenge mostly senior scholars to come up with topics that fit our profile--topics that were important but had not yet crossed to other disciplines.
Next, we set up every session to encourage "what if….?" and "what else…?"discussions. We recorded each session, had the recordings transcribed, and then combed through the transcripts for subjects that even the person speaking might not have fully realized was a subject. Then we set about recruiting contributors to a new written work.
By 2006, as a consequence, we were able to expand the number of such topics to 80. Also by then, the array of academic disciplines and practice specialties we were able to draw on numbered almost thirty. When the American Bar Association published the resulting book, The Negotiator's Fieldbook, the 80-contributor, nearly 800-page volume stood as the most comprehensive reference in our field. Inherently demonstrating the project's cross-disciplinary commitment, the Fieldbook was also a rare, perhaps unique, experience for that particular publisher--a book in which fewer than half of the contributors were lawyers.
To our great delight, more than ten years later, the Fieldbook is still one of the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary reference works on negotiation you can buy. But our field has not, of course, stood still in that decade. We are therefore replacing that book with The Negotiator's Desk Reference.
The Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project and Other Influences
Initially, one of the goals of the Fieldbook was to foster the development of advanced courses in negotiation, and most of the material in the book was considered appropriate for that setting. We were not, at the time, much concerned with the basic courses. Six months later, however, Chris published an article (Honeyman 2007) which amounted to a challenge to his own previous point of view: a supposedly simple real estate transaction had left him with the uneasy feeling that a great deal of knowledge that one might require to understand or be successful at "basic" negotiation was only now being considered even for "advanced" courses.
At the same time, a second initiative--a three-year, four-country, six-university project1 to develop transnational alternative dispute resolution curricula, started by James Coben and Giuseppe De Palo, and with Chris serving as standing evaluator--was reaching related conclusions. Together, the three decided to mount a new interdisciplinary project that would follow up on both streams of inquiry.
In short order, it became apparent that many experienced negotiation teachers were open to the possibility that the field might be ripe for a comprehensive attempt to rethink what is taught and how it is taught in basic negotiation courses. Certainly, our experiences with courses taught in many countries supported the notion that a common set of concepts, materials and methods had evolved. (Schneider and Lewicki 2006) Indeed, one of the concerns which drove the project was the perception that the concepts, materials, methods and, even more important, the underlying values of all of these were primarily American in origin, and perhaps less transferable to other cultures than many teachers assumed.
The result was a collaboration between Hamline University Law School's Dispute Resolution Institute, ADR Center (Rome), the JAMS Foundation, Harvard's Negotiation Journal, and many of those who had contributed to the Fieldbook. The organizers planned a multi-year effort originally entitled the Developing "Second Generation" Global Education Project, with the formal beginning taking place in May 2008 at a four-day meeting in Rome. This meeting was intended to produce a first set of writings that might serve as a kind of blueprint for adaptation of short courses in negotiation, to take account of recent discoveries and to confront the challenges of teaching them in cross-cultural settings. To extend the cross-cultural learning, the group scheduled the second round of the effort for Istanbul in late 2009; in 2011, the third round began with a meeting in Beijing.
Rethinking Negotiating Teaching and Venturing Beyond the Classroom (volumes 1 and 2 in the RNT series) discussed the group's findings from the first two meetings in some detail. These were followed by a book that gave special attention to the problems of deciding how much someone had actually learned about the field (Assessing Our Students, Assessing Ourselves) and one which sought to pull together and advance further the concepts developed throughout the project (Educating Negotiators for a Connected World).2 Supplementing these books were a special issue of Negotiation Journal, an issue of the Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, and finally, the 2012 launch of the first journal of our field to be published in China, Tan Pan. Chris served as co-director of the project throughout and as co-editor of all the books and journal issues; Andrea served on the project's steering committee and as co-author of eight different chapters across the book and journal series. As a result, the Canon initiative was thoroughly integrated with the RNT project throughout.
In closing the RNT project, the team remarked:
Our field now has new frontiers in all directions: inward within the individual negotiator, toward an integration of the mental with the physical, and toward a "mathematics of emotions"; outward, toward the engineering of more sophisticated tools for handling major public disputes; toward professionalization, with a new appreciation of the value of decades of prior work experience in a "new" professional negotiator; and simultaneously, toward broader dissemination of skills, with a new appreciation of the fact that virtually everyone will negotiate (even in the boxing ring!) but most will not ever take a course in the subject. (Honeyman et al. 2013)
Preparing the Present Volumes
We began this phase of our project by thoroughly re-examining our premises, along with the more trenchant comments by reviewers who had otherwise been very generous to the Fieldbook. For example, the reviewer in the international negotiation journal PinPoints noted that the original book was all too American. He gently expressed a hope that someday there would be a successor that would draw more material from more cultures. (Cede 2007) We have tried to take his admonition to heart. While about 11% of the 2006 book's contributors were not from the U.S., about 25% of the new contributors added since then are from outside the U.S. Below, we note our strategy to increase this further over time.
The next step was to canvass a number of people at three workshops, starting in late 2013. One, focused exclusively on updating the Canon, was a two-day symposium held at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, with two dozen senior scholars from different parts of our field (including several from outside the U.S.) The other two workshops helped give us a more international perspective, and were held in Hong Kong (in conjunction with the inaugural symposium of Tan Pan, a new Chinese-English journal on negotiation), and at the 2014 meeting of the International Association of Conflict Management, in Leiden, Netherlands.
Then we spent a good deal of time rereading and discussing every chapter from the original edition of the Negotiator's Fieldbook. We completed that process at the end of 2014. One result was that it became clear that we needed an overall structure for our replacement "products" that would respond to the much broader potential audience we now believe is possible.
Among the surprises to us at the workshops was high enthusiasm for electronic versions of the new writings, among even our most senior colleagues. Also, largely because of the five-year, four-book Rethinking Negotiation Teaching project already discussed, our contacts among professionals outside the U.S. have improved considerably since the inception of the Canon of Negotiation initiative.
There is a well-known model for a broader, more varied and frequently updated publication structure, and it has been a great success in its own market. Although its subject matter and audiences are very different from ours, we have found inspiration in the Physician's Desk Reference, which over 65 years has evolved to the point where it publishes multiple print editions, updates them at least annually, and yet now serves most of its readers through online editions. We have taken the hint and now plan to market our new flagship book both in print and online, under the umbrella title of the Negotiator's Desk Reference.
As will be evident from a glance at the table of contents, more than a hundred people have contributed to this new stage of the Canon initiative. The Introduction which follows will outline the contents further.
The Desk Reference and the Fieldbook
With the publication of this book, the Desk Reference now takes on the key function that in 2006 we had in mind for the first edition of the Fieldbook. That is, this book now represents our considered effort to gather everything we can that we believe to be key to understanding how negotiation works, and how it can be used more effectively in many settings.
This in effect releases the title "The Negotiator's Fieldbook" for re-use as something closer to what the title actually promises--i.e., a book you might actually carry with you to a meeting. (Wisely, few of the buyers of the original edition wanted to do that.)
Accordingly, the new edition of the Fieldbook, yet to be published, will be constructed very differently. We plan to use the Desk Reference as its information base, and will try to give efficient and quite prescriptive advice drawn from our larger work as the key contribution of each chapter. We also intend to give special emphasis there to the needs and interests of lawyers, since negotiation comprises such a high percentage of the daily work of most lawyers.
What Comes Next?
The entire, almost fifteen-year progress of the Canon of Negotiation Initiative has been, at least in part, a humbling exercise in discovering how much we, veterans of the field, did not know. Yet that is also the source of our continuing excitement about our field's potential. In this latest installment, we have tried to make explicit and structural provision for discovering more in future. This is the other reason why access to the electronic edition is included without charge with every copy sold of the print edition: because print editions by their nature are hard to update.
Not so for the electronic edition. On the date of publication, it will consist of two volumes which will be identical to the content of the print edition. But thereafter, we expect the electronic edition's third volume to be filled gradually, as we discover and recruit scholars and expert practitioners from cultures and in specialties we as yet know little or nothing about.
We can only guess at what our field has yet to discover. And we look forward to educating ourselves as well as our readers.
Notes
1 The project's full name was "Developing Transnational Curricula in Negotiation, Mediation, Arbitration and Dispute Systems Design", and it was supported by a joint grant from the European Commission, Directorate-General for Education EC/US Cooperation Program in Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training, and the U.S. Department of Education Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE).
2 The four RNT books are all available without charge, chapter by chapter in PDF format, thanks to a generous series of grants from the JAMS Foundation. They can be accessed at http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/dri_press/.
References
Cede, F. 2007. Review of The Negotiator's Fieldbook. PINPoints #28, 2007. Processes of International Negotiation Program, The Hague, Netherlands. Online at http://www.pin-negotiation.org/index.php?page=264&item=148
Honeyman, C. 2007. A Sale of Land in Somerset County. Negotiation Journal, Vol 23/2.
Honeyman, C., Coben, J., and Lee, A. W-M. 2013. Introduction. Educating Negotiators for a Connected World. St. Paul: DRI Press.
Schneider, A. K. and Honeyman, C. 2006. The Negotiator's Fieldbook. Washington, DC: American Bar Association.
Schneider, A. K. and R. Lewicki 2016. The Past and Future Challenges of Negotiation Teaching. Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 31:1.
We formed the Canon of Negotiation Initiative (www.convenor.com/canon-of-negotiation.html) in 2003, initially to see if there was a substantial quantity of research that might be applicable beyond the domain (law, public policy, business and international relations, at first) that had originated each piece. The first venture was a small conference, of roughly twenty "second-generation" scholars and practitioners--handpicked to combine the most subject-matter breadth possible within that number, along with the requisite depth of knowledge. The result was a full special issue of the Marquette Law Review (Vol. 108/2, Spring 2004), with two dozen articles.
This experiment generated interest among more than a few colleagues. (In a telling sign that we were on to something, at least in the eyes of one major user group, that edition of the law review also became one of the most excerpted and cited single issues on negotiation of any law journal in the U.S.) These articles outlined research, ideas and practical experience that had originated from legal, business, international relations and urban planning professionals, and that were increasingly known in their original domain. Yet every one of these subjects had, up to that point, failed to cross over in any meaningful degree into any of the other domains we were studying.
Devising The Negotiator's Fieldbook
At that point we realized that if one venture on a twenty-scholar scale could find this much scholarship ripe for cross-disciplinary use, there might be considerably more such material--if we could engage a larger variety of scholars and practitioners in looking for it. So in 2004-2005 we organized sixteen panels, at four of the major conferences in different sectors of the field, including the ABA Section on Dispute Resolution; Law & Society Association; International Association for Conflict Management, and Association for Conflict Resolution. This time, our gambit was to challenge mostly senior scholars to come up with topics that fit our profile--topics that were important but had not yet crossed to other disciplines.
Next, we set up every session to encourage "what if….?" and "what else…?"discussions. We recorded each session, had the recordings transcribed, and then combed through the transcripts for subjects that even the person speaking might not have fully realized was a subject. Then we set about recruiting contributors to a new written work.
By 2006, as a consequence, we were able to expand the number of such topics to 80. Also by then, the array of academic disciplines and practice specialties we were able to draw on numbered almost thirty. When the American Bar Association published the resulting book, The Negotiator's Fieldbook, the 80-contributor, nearly 800-page volume stood as the most comprehensive reference in our field. Inherently demonstrating the project's cross-disciplinary commitment, the Fieldbook was also a rare, perhaps unique, experience for that particular publisher--a book in which fewer than half of the contributors were lawyers.
To our great delight, more than ten years later, the Fieldbook is still one of the most comprehensive and multidisciplinary reference works on negotiation you can buy. But our field has not, of course, stood still in that decade. We are therefore replacing that book with The Negotiator's Desk Reference.
The Rethinking Negotiation Teaching Project and Other Influences
Initially, one of the goals of the Fieldbook was to foster the development of advanced courses in negotiation, and most of the material in the book was considered appropriate for that setting. We were not, at the time, much concerned with the basic courses. Six months later, however, Chris published an article (Honeyman 2007) which amounted to a challenge to his own previous point of view: a supposedly simple real estate transaction had left him with the uneasy feeling that a great deal of knowledge that one might require to understand or be successful at "basic" negotiation was only now being considered even for "advanced" courses.
At the same time, a second initiative--a three-year, four-country, six-university project1 to develop transnational alternative dispute resolution curricula, started by James Coben and Giuseppe De Palo, and with Chris serving as standing evaluator--was reaching related conclusions. Together, the three decided to mount a new interdisciplinary project that would follow up on both streams of inquiry.
In short order, it became apparent that many experienced negotiation teachers were open to the possibility that the field might be ripe for a comprehensive attempt to rethink what is taught and how it is taught in basic negotiation courses. Certainly, our experiences with courses taught in many countries supported the notion that a common set of concepts, materials and methods had evolved. (Schneider and Lewicki 2006) Indeed, one of the concerns which drove the project was the perception that the concepts, materials, methods and, even more important, the underlying values of all of these were primarily American in origin, and perhaps less transferable to other cultures than many teachers assumed.
The result was a collaboration between Hamline University Law School's Dispute Resolution Institute, ADR Center (Rome), the JAMS Foundation, Harvard's Negotiation Journal, and many of those who had contributed to the Fieldbook. The organizers planned a multi-year effort originally entitled the Developing "Second Generation" Global Education Project, with the formal beginning taking place in May 2008 at a four-day meeting in Rome. This meeting was intended to produce a first set of writings that might serve as a kind of blueprint for adaptation of short courses in negotiation, to take account of recent discoveries and to confront the challenges of teaching them in cross-cultural settings. To extend the cross-cultural learning, the group scheduled the second round of the effort for Istanbul in late 2009; in 2011, the third round began with a meeting in Beijing.
Rethinking Negotiating Teaching and Venturing Beyond the Classroom (volumes 1 and 2 in the RNT series) discussed the group's findings from the first two meetings in some detail. These were followed by a book that gave special attention to the problems of deciding how much someone had actually learned about the field (Assessing Our Students, Assessing Ourselves) and one which sought to pull together and advance further the concepts developed throughout the project (Educating Negotiators for a Connected World).2 Supplementing these books were a special issue of Negotiation Journal, an issue of the Hamline Journal of Public Law and Policy, and finally, the 2012 launch of the first journal of our field to be published in China, Tan Pan. Chris served as co-director of the project throughout and as co-editor of all the books and journal issues; Andrea served on the project's steering committee and as co-author of eight different chapters across the book and journal series. As a result, the Canon initiative was thoroughly integrated with the RNT project throughout.
In closing the RNT project, the team remarked:
Our field now has new frontiers in all directions: inward within the individual negotiator, toward an integration of the mental with the physical, and toward a "mathematics of emotions"; outward, toward the engineering of more sophisticated tools for handling major public disputes; toward professionalization, with a new appreciation of the value of decades of prior work experience in a "new" professional negotiator; and simultaneously, toward broader dissemination of skills, with a new appreciation of the fact that virtually everyone will negotiate (even in the boxing ring!) but most will not ever take a course in the subject. (Honeyman et al. 2013)
Preparing the Present Volumes
We began this phase of our project by thoroughly re-examining our premises, along with the more trenchant comments by reviewers who had otherwise been very generous to the Fieldbook. For example, the reviewer in the international negotiation journal PinPoints noted that the original book was all too American. He gently expressed a hope that someday there would be a successor that would draw more material from more cultures. (Cede 2007) We have tried to take his admonition to heart. While about 11% of the 2006 book's contributors were not from the U.S., about 25% of the new contributors added since then are from outside the U.S. Below, we note our strategy to increase this further over time.
The next step was to canvass a number of people at three workshops, starting in late 2013. One, focused exclusively on updating the Canon, was a two-day symposium held at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, with two dozen senior scholars from different parts of our field (including several from outside the U.S.) The other two workshops helped give us a more international perspective, and were held in Hong Kong (in conjunction with the inaugural symposium of Tan Pan, a new Chinese-English journal on negotiation), and at the 2014 meeting of the International Association of Conflict Management, in Leiden, Netherlands.
Then we spent a good deal of time rereading and discussing every chapter from the original edition of the Negotiator's Fieldbook. We completed that process at the end of 2014. One result was that it became clear that we needed an overall structure for our replacement "products" that would respond to the much broader potential audience we now believe is possible.
Among the surprises to us at the workshops was high enthusiasm for electronic versions of the new writings, among even our most senior colleagues. Also, largely because of the five-year, four-book Rethinking Negotiation Teaching project already discussed, our contacts among professionals outside the U.S. have improved considerably since the inception of the Canon of Negotiation initiative.
There is a well-known model for a broader, more varied and frequently updated publication structure, and it has been a great success in its own market. Although its subject matter and audiences are very different from ours, we have found inspiration in the Physician's Desk Reference, which over 65 years has evolved to the point where it publishes multiple print editions, updates them at least annually, and yet now serves most of its readers through online editions. We have taken the hint and now plan to market our new flagship book both in print and online, under the umbrella title of the Negotiator's Desk Reference.
As will be evident from a glance at the table of contents, more than a hundred people have contributed to this new stage of the Canon initiative. The Introduction which follows will outline the contents further.
The Desk Reference and the Fieldbook
With the publication of this book, the Desk Reference now takes on the key function that in 2006 we had in mind for the first edition of the Fieldbook. That is, this book now represents our considered effort to gather everything we can that we believe to be key to understanding how negotiation works, and how it can be used more effectively in many settings.
This in effect releases the title "The Negotiator's Fieldbook" for re-use as something closer to what the title actually promises--i.e., a book you might actually carry with you to a meeting. (Wisely, few of the buyers of the original edition wanted to do that.)
Accordingly, the new edition of the Fieldbook, yet to be published, will be constructed very differently. We plan to use the Desk Reference as its information base, and will try to give efficient and quite prescriptive advice drawn from our larger work as the key contribution of each chapter. We also intend to give special emphasis there to the needs and interests of lawyers, since negotiation comprises such a high percentage of the daily work of most lawyers.
What Comes Next?
The entire, almost fifteen-year progress of the Canon of Negotiation Initiative has been, at least in part, a humbling exercise in discovering how much we, veterans of the field, did not know. Yet that is also the source of our continuing excitement about our field's potential. In this latest installment, we have tried to make explicit and structural provision for discovering more in future. This is the other reason why access to the electronic edition is included without charge with every copy sold of the print edition: because print editions by their nature are hard to update.
Not so for the electronic edition. On the date of publication, it will consist of two volumes which will be identical to the content of the print edition. But thereafter, we expect the electronic edition's third volume to be filled gradually, as we discover and recruit scholars and expert practitioners from cultures and in specialties we as yet know little or nothing about.
We can only guess at what our field has yet to discover. And we look forward to educating ourselves as well as our readers.
Notes
1 The project's full name was "Developing Transnational Curricula in Negotiation, Mediation, Arbitration and Dispute Systems Design", and it was supported by a joint grant from the European Commission, Directorate-General for Education EC/US Cooperation Program in Higher Education and Vocational Education and Training, and the U.S. Department of Education Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE).
2 The four RNT books are all available without charge, chapter by chapter in PDF format, thanks to a generous series of grants from the JAMS Foundation. They can be accessed at http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/dri_press/.
References
Cede, F. 2007. Review of The Negotiator's Fieldbook. PINPoints #28, 2007. Processes of International Negotiation Program, The Hague, Netherlands. Online at http://www.pin-negotiation.org/index.php?page=264&item=148
Honeyman, C. 2007. A Sale of Land in Somerset County. Negotiation Journal, Vol 23/2.
Honeyman, C., Coben, J., and Lee, A. W-M. 2013. Introduction. Educating Negotiators for a Connected World. St. Paul: DRI Press.
Schneider, A. K. and Honeyman, C. 2006. The Negotiator's Fieldbook. Washington, DC: American Bar Association.
Schneider, A. K. and R. Lewicki 2016. The Past and Future Challenges of Negotiation Teaching. Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution 31:1.