BEHAVIOR
Behavioral analysis uses the negotiator as the analytical variable, and in so doing faces serious conceptual challenges that it has not yet fully worked out. The approach is doubtless the oldest and most persistent, for it prevails today at the hands of many diplomats who feel that they alone know how to negotiate, in nontransmissible ways.
However, at that level, it becomes totally idiosyncratic. To serve as a basis for analysis, the approach must group individuals into meaningful behavioral categories.The basic dichotomy of the previous century between Shopkeepers and Warriors (Nicolson 1939) has been repeated in many forms, notably as Softliners and Hardliners (Snyder & Diesing 1975) and Doves and Hawks. While intuitively attractive, it is far too manichean a division, to the point where even the Hawks-Doves added Owls to complete their world. The most recent and more complex attempt divides personalities into five categories—competitor, avoider, accom- modator, collaborator/problem-solver, and compromiser (or shark, turtle, teddybear, owl, and fox, in another formulation) (Thomas & Killman 1974), which have in turn been correlated as appropriate strategies (and hence not personalities at all) for situations of transaction, tacit cooperation, relationships, and balanced concerns, with the compromiser/fox a jack-of-all-conflicts (Shell 1999).3
Personalities are often key to the resolution or nonresolution of conflict by negotiation, but their categorization still remains elusive. One can analyze the crucial role of Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk in making a resolution of the South Africa conflict (Sisk 1995; Zartman 1995), and of Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, and Jimmy Carter in Camp David I and Ehud Barak, Yasir Arafat, and Bill Clinton at Camp David II, but putting these distinct personalities into meaningful typologies has not yet been accomplished.
Collective personality, in the form of culture, constitutes another focus of negotiation research for conflict resolution, as discussed in the chapter by Faure in this work.
A surge of studies on national negotiating styles has produced a better understanding of how nations negotiate (Janosik 1987; Graham & Sano 1989; McDonald 1996; Lebedeva & Kremenyuk 1997; Schecter 1998; Snyder 1999; Solomon 1999; Diamant 2000; Blaker et al. 2002; Smyser 2003; Wittes 2005), but at the risk of stereotyping, thus reducing the creativity that is the key to successful negotiation. More work is needed to find the appropriate collectivity to which the term “culture” can be applied and to identify negotiating traits that are crosscultural compared to those that are intrinsic (and to explain their presence by some other variable than a tautological use of “culture”). Thus, culture is a delicate variable on which to hang an analysis of process and outcomes, yet undeniably it matters. Analysts are still looking for the best way to handle it (Cohen 1997; Faure & Rubin 1997; Avruch 1998.) One way is to look at crosscutting variables of the same sort that run across national boundaries. Work on professional culture has only begun, showing that such commonalities do matter too, although not definitively (Sjostedt 2003). The “which when why?” question still poses its challenge.
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