Heeding the Recommendations of Early Scholars
Early communication scholars set forth four recommendations that have influenced research on conflict management. Specifically, they suggested that scholars (a) expand the theories and models of communication and conflict, (b) work from similar definitions and assumptions, (c) broaden research settings and methods, and (d) focus on conflict development over time (Miller, 1974; Mortensen, 1974; Simons, 1974b).
In response to the first recommendation, communication scholars have expanded their approaches to include systems interaction models as well as discourse, symbolic, and critical perspectives. Since its early investigations, however, the field has shifted away from social and political conflicts to focus on interpersonal, group, and organizational disputes.During this time, the field borrowed and adapted conflict models used in other disciplines, specifically ones employed in psychology, management, and labor relations. Disenchanted with these traditional models, however, scholars introduced frameworks from discourse analysis; for example, using language intensity and verbal immediacy to study mediation and negotiation, communication competency for interpersonal disputes, and dialectics to examine hostage negotiations, interpersonal conflicts, and organizational dilemmas. Thus, the field began to develop its own theories and models for studying communication and conflict.
On the second recommendation, a general consensus exists among communication scholars regarding definitions and essential elements of conflict, even though investigators differ in their foci of conflict (i.e., incompatible relationships, incommensurate values, or scarce resources). Researchers highlight similar but diverse features of communication, including messages and interaction analyses, symbolic acts, and subjective or codeveloped meanings.
Moreover, most communication scholars treat conflict as normal and inevitable rather than as an aberration, thus, rejecting the idea that conflict is a disruption of harmony. Research as a whole, though, focuses on successful versus unsuccessful patterns of conflict management and on ways to avoid destructive cycles rather than on the benefits of conflict. For the most part, then, communication scholars work from similar definitions and assumptions about conflict, even though they vary in how they operationalize key features of it.Moreover, scholars have now moved away from treating conflict as something objective or outside of people’s cognitive realms and social interactions, but almost to a fault. In doing so, they have removed conflict from its material manifestations. In the zeal to embrace interpretive views of social reality, communication scholars have abandoned the way in which conflict cycles and symbolic meanings become rooted in material manifestations of power and control. The limited research on large-scale social conflicts and international disputes may contribute to this neglect.
In response to the third recommendation, communication scholars have clearly broadened research settings and methods. Researchers have analyzed conflicts in naturalistic settings of homes, schools, organizations, and communities; they have observed actual hostage negotiations, teacher-administrator bargaining, labor disputes, community and divorce mediations, team meetings, organizational change processes, and multiparty environmental disputes. In laboratory studies, researchers have developed creative simulations such as buying and selling used textbooks, training for intercultural interactions, and simulations of typical interpersonal conflicts.
Research methods are as diverse as these settings. Investigators have obtained transcripts of actual conflict events, used video- and audiotapes to document interactions, interviewed participants, examined documents and newspaper coverage of conflicts, and conducted ethnographies and participant observation.
Systems interaction research and discourse analyses in both laboratory and natural settings have employed laborious coding and tracking of interaction patterns—ones that privilege communication as the focal point of conflict. In addition, researchers have studied highly volatile conflicts, such as hostage negotiations, racial disputes, and multiparty intractable environmental conflicts, thus demonstrating that communication scholars do not have an aversion to uncivil and explosive disputes (Simon, 1974a). In effect, diversity in context and methods clearly adds to the contributions that communication scholars have made to the study of conflict.In response to the fourth suggestion, communication studies have focused on conflict as a developmental process. Building from the transactional model (Mortensen, 1974), investigators have examined the functions of messages, their sequential and interdependent relationships, and their evolution over time in a variety of conflict situations. Researchers have embraced an array of quantitative and qualitative tracking techniques, including lag sequential, Markov chain analyses, phase mapping, and computer tracking of discourse patterns. Studies of conflict styles have employed scenarios that document changes in style use over time. Communication researchers, thus, have responded positively to the recommendation to focus on conflict dynamics. Overall, research in the field clearly heeded the advice of early scholars to expand theories and models, work from similar definitions of conflict, broaden research settings and methods, and focus on process and conflict development.