Managing Conflict in a Negotiated World

A Narrative Approach to Achieving Productive Dialogue and Change

Peter M. Kellett, Diana G. Dalton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761918899, 9780761918882
• eBook ISBN: 9781506320823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Peter Kellett and Diana Dalton set out in this text to address the question: How do people manage conflict effectively? This is a simple question with an elusive and complex answer. To determine how to manage conflict one must first understand the meaning of conflict for those engaged in it. The authors do this by presenting a step-by-step guide to describing, interpreting, understanding and managing conflict. Using real life narratives, they explain how and why conflict occurs and strategies that one can deploy to manage the conflict. These interpretive and dialogic skills are illustrated clearly through the pairing of personal narratives with relevant discussion questions and challenging exercises. The first part of the book aims to equip readers with the ability to collect, analyze, and learn from conflicts from the perspective of developing more dialogic relationships. The second part enables the reader to apply this interpretive process to several communication contexts. With their thorough coverage of conflict management issues and their engaging writing style, Peter Kellett and Diana Dalton compel readers to examine their own conflicts for opportunities to learn, grow, communicate and change.

PART I

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Understanding Conflict Narratives

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Understanding why conflicts happen in your life is the key to well-reasoned action and productive change in how you handle conflicts. The level of understanding necessary to know why conflicts happen and how you can do them differently where appropriate does not come easy. Such insight comes through careful and constant reflection on your conflict experiences and how you account for those experiences. Careful reflection requires both a useful means of accessing, collecting, and studying your conflicts and a systematic process of inquiry into those conflicts. The following section of this book is designed to help you develop the ability to collect and reflect on your conflict experiences so you achieve deeper and more empowering levels of understanding about the choices you make in conflicts and the choices you could make.

More specifically, Chapter 1 presents you with a perspective on conflict as a necessary, even beneficial process, depending in large part on how it is managed. You acquire an understanding of the opportunities for improved dialogue that almost all conflicts represent.

Chapter 2 enables you to develop the ability to collect and reflect on conflict experiences through personal narrative accounts—stories—of conflict.

Chapter 3 enables you to develop an understanding of how to analyze conflict narratives for clues about ourselves and how we represent others in our conflicts. You also come to understand that the communicative contexts we create and that are created for us by our conflicts play an important role in our ability to fully understand the contextuality of conflicts.

Chapter 4 provides a detailed explanation of how to collect, write, and interpret conflicts through personal narratives.

Each of the four chapters in the first half of this book combine to equip you with the ability to collect, analyze, and learn from conflicts from the perspective of developing more dialogic relationships. At each step, others’ stories are available for you to interpret. You learn how to ask good questions of these stories presented for your analysis. You also are challenged to ask yourself good questions about your own conflict experiences. By developing your ability to ask good questions and to synthesize the answers into coherent interpretations of narrative, you become prepared to collect and interpret your own conflict experiences as well as those of others. Part II of this book enables you to apply this interpretive process in several communication contexts.

1

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Conflict and Dialogue in a Negotiated World

“[Peace is] the optimal outcome of conflict, and a necessary condition of civilization.”

(Donohue, 1997, p. 65)

“Negotiation is a test of the self.”

(Nierenberg, 1973, p. 87)

Typically, we all bring to a discussion about conflict a number of preconceptions representative of our lived experience. They are true for us, but sometimes they are quite limiting. Specifically, we often realize that conflict is a difficult, complex, and frequently mismanaged process in the world around us. We may also feel uncomfortable about and even afraid of conflict. For a variety of reasons, we are more likely to experience the results of avoidance, aggression, and compromise than we are to see the results of increased understanding through effective dialogue. We may realize that our approach to conflict management affects the health of our relationships and the quality of the social world that we help to create. However, cultural myths about conflict that structure our communication practices are also often deeply held. Besides showing how your conflicts affect your relationships, this chapter outlines some of the central assumptions that frame this text. You are challenged to examine cultural myths about conflict that often limit both your willingness to do conflict, and your understanding of conflict as a potentially positive experience. You are introduced to the concept of the negotiated world and how conflict can play beneficial or dangerous roles in that world, largely depending on how it is approached and managed. You are challenged and encouraged to start thinking about conflicts that occur in the communities, workplaces, families, and relationships that make up your life-world. You are also challenged to think about conflict processes that are important in all of these contexts. Finally, the importance of a dialogic approach to managing conflict and a narrative approach to studying conflict, are introduced.

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Key Concepts, Terms, and Definitions to Learn in This Chapter

• Why conflict is inevitable and even necessary in human relationships
• How conflict can be beneficial or damaging to relationships depending partly on how it is managed
• The factors and choices that create productive and destructive conflicts
• Why truly negotiating conflicts is rare
• How to approach conflict as a peacemaker
• What some of the myths about conflict practices are and how they affect your conflicts
• How you negotiate and create your reality partly through conflict
• How to practice dialogue as a way of communicating
• How dialogue is different from arguing
• How to evaluate the quality of dialogue in a conflict by analyzing narrative accounts of the conflict
• How narratives provide a way in to understanding your conflicts

Key Definitions

• Productive and destructive conflict. Productive conflicts occur when a conflict moves toward resolution and where the psychological and relational health of the participants is maintained. Destructive conflict results in a worse situation and, sometimes, harm to the participants.
• Negotiation. Negotiation occurs when participants strive to collaboratively resolve conflicts.
• Dialogue and argument. Dialogue occurs when conflict participants engage themselves and the other(s) in the deep questioning that leads to mutual understanding and resolution of the conflict. Argument is polarized talk based on the demonstration of reasoned positions.
• Peace. Peace is the presence of habits of communication that promote both conciliation and reconciliation.
• Narratives. Narratives are more or less fully developed personal accounts or stories of a conflict.

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THE NEED TO UNDERSTAND CONFLICT IN OUR WORLD

As humans, we have an innate need to make sense of and understand our experiences. This is a precursor to developing the intelligence to make choices about that experience. Language, specifically narrative, allows us to step away from the ongoing flow of action and talk about and reflect on that action so that we can rethink and sometimes reshape our actions. As we reflect on our conflict experiences, one of the curious paradoxes we face is the fact that most conflicts would be easy to resolve if the participants truly communicated, but they rarely do. Although communication is pervasive and largely instinctive, it is not easy to do well. The following story illustrates the fact that real life can be informed by applying theories and resolution principles, but that life does not necessarily fall neatly into simple formulae. This narrative also illustrates that conflicts in families can reappear and come out in interesting ways that may be only symbolically or tangentially related to the original conflict. This is one of the main reasons conflicts are often difficult to resolve. Note the ways that people become symbolic in the other party’s construction of the conflict. Notice also the imagery used to describe the conflict and its “buildup,” for example, and the “cycle” as an image of repeating patterns.

Exemplar Narrative: The Never-Ending Conflict

— REINA

When I was three years old my mother decided to leave my father. He was an abusive husband and she feared him. My mother and I moved to New York until the divorce settlement was finalized. When I was about six years old, we moved back to Charlotte, NC. While we were in New York and even after we moved to NC, my mother always told me what an awful man my father was. After we moved to North Carolina, she had me escorted in and out and around school. She told me that my dad had threatened to kidnap me. My mom also nailed the windows down and had four locks on both the front and back doors. She did not want to encounter my dad.

From the time I was three years old to about twelve years old, I was not allowed to see or talk to my dad, with few exceptions. The exception was when my dad got a court order for visitation rights. I was about seven when this happened. I was able to go different places with my dad and stepmom. I spent the whole weekend with them every two weeks. However, my mom made me give a report of events every time I came home and she would write it down in a notebook. After the third visit with my father, I was not able to spend time with him again. From being around my father, I desired to have a relationship with him. I was becoming more of a daddy’s little girl and my mother hated it. So, I was told that if I made contact with him, I would be punished.

I was in sixth grade and I wanted to go on a field trip for a week to Boone with my school. My mom didn’t have the money, so she asked my dad for it. He gave her the money with the condition that he could start seeing me again. I got very close to my dad within a year, but I got more and more distant from my mother. My mother and I never had a great relationship, but at this time in my life it was very bad. She finally got mad enough to send me to live with my father. I was scared because my relationship with my father was based on random weekends spent together over my entire life of twelve years. My mom knew she had instilled fear of my father in me. She felt that this would punish me and straighten me up.

My mother’s worst fear happened, I was daddy’s little girl. I loved living with my father. I had never had such a stable life before. It was like going from rags to riches in all aspects. There was very little arguing, not because I was avoiding it, we just never had conflicts. I lived with my father for four years this way.

My dad did not like a guy I had been seeing, and tension was building. On this particular day, I was sick with food poisoning and had been sleeping all day. I made a phone call to a guy friend to cancel going out that night. My dad, step mom, and my little sister came home when I was making this phone call. My little sister picked up the phone and wouldn’t hang it up. So, I went and told dad on her. Dad told me to get off the phone as I had been on it all day long. I made a smart remark, which I had never done before, and he came after me up the stairs. I ran to my room, locked the door, and got off ...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Understanding Conflict Narratives
• Part II Changing Relationships Through Conflict
• References
• Index
• About the Authors