In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to close down the lab. The moral landscape (...) had changed, and it was no longer considered acceptable to use nonhuman primates in Danish biomedicine. From being considered a biological resource serving as a model of man, the monkeys had become moral subjects with a claim to a life suiting their natural needs. Simultaneously, the monkeys became instrumental in creating moral legitimacy for the actors involved in their rescue. What we see is an instance of pathfinding in a changing moral landscape where actors negotiate nonhuman primate nature as they create new moral positions for themselves. (shrink)

At the beginning of the twentieth century, human and veterinary surgeons faced the challenge of a medical marketplace transformed by technology. The socioeconomic value ascribed to their patients was changing, reflecting the increasing mechanization of industry and the decreasing dependence of society on nonhuman animals for labor. In human medicine, concern for the economic consequences of fractures “pathologized” any significant level of posttherapeutic disability, a productivist perspective contrary to the traditional corpus of medical values. In contrast, veterinarians adapted to (...) the mechanization of horsepower by shifting their primary professional interest to companion animals; a type of patient generally valued for the unique emotional attachment of the owner and not their productive capacity. The economic rationalization of human fracture care and the “sentimental” transformation of veterinary orthopedic expertise indicate how these specialists utilized increasingly convergent rhetorical arguments to justify the application of innovative fracture care technologies to their human and animal patients. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the limits of narrative by asking what kinds of things narratives do, and what kinds of texts do related things in other ways. In particular I focus on how narrative genres organise time in relation to value, drawing on functional linguistic models of temporality and evaluation. From a linguistic perspective, the various narrative genres negotiate different kinds of solidarity with listeners, and so the limits of narrative materialise various possibilities for communing in a (...) culture, alongside the potentialities for construing community through related and other genres of discourse—since in general, the limits/possibilities of our language (and attendant modalities of communication) are the limits/possibilities of our social world. (shrink)

Prolonged conflict on the southern Thailand border still continues, especially in four provinces – Pattani, Yala, Narathivat, and Satun. These four provinces are the home base of the Malay-Muslim community. However, conflicts have almost never occurred in the province of Phattalung, particularly in the region called ‘Two Religion Community Life’. This is because people can find solutions to every problem using cultural negotiation. This research aims to describe the results of cultural negotiation and social learning between Muslims and Buddhists in (...) solving daily life problems. The most important data collection techniques are in-depth interviews and observations. There are five critical informants chosen purposively: Islamic and Buddhist religious leaders, community leaders, school principals, and community members in the Tamot and Khaocan regions. The results found that there are several forms of cultural negotiation in Phattalung, including annual ritual prayers conducted together by Muslims and Buddhists, agreement on how to slaughter animals to be served during ceremonies, tradition of food bartering, and agreement on animal caring. Furthermore, social learning to preserve the results of the negotiations is carried out through the establishment of voluntary medical groups whose members consist of young men and women from the Muslim and the Buddhist community, sports and arts activities, commemorations of national holidays, and conducting annual religious rituals at the same place and time. This study also found four important aspects to strengthen the social learning in multireligious society – moderate values derived from their respective religious teachings, moderate values taught by the country, the existence of trust among citizens, and win-win solutions to the emerging problems. Contribution: This research promotes the world that there is a heterogeneous religious community in the Phattalung province, Thailand which has a building construction of tolerance and harmony of locality namely the ‘Two Religion Community Life’ by preserving the cultural negotiation values through social learning. (shrink)

In this exploratory study, we look at the professed values that people have, and their performance in a negotiation. We found relations between Schwartz values and conflict handling behaviors, and distributive, integrative, and compatible negotiation outcomes in a controlled environment using Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) analysis.

This article explores the influence of modernity in India, within the larger framework of state-led modernity and its impact on identity and locality. The discourse on modernity has retained the common thread of transience and reflexivity as two constitutive features, both of which are taken up to explain the uncertain and provisional influence of modernity on the Indian society and identity, and the radical engagement of social movements with modernity. The article studies the complex functioning of modernity in India by (...) presenting a theoretical outline on the contested nature of the concept, with an emphasis on the discussion around reflexivity, which forms one of the core attributes for the creation of multiple and alternative modernities, by reviewing state-led modernity in India and its impact on identity formation as a consequence of the numerous and variable cultural and value systems that confront individuals and by looking at the local appropriation of contested spaces to enter into a radical, value-based engagement with global modernity. (shrink)

‘It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broad...

This article reports on qualitative research conducted in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, among researchers and gate-keepers of health facilities in the province. Results suggest disparate but not irreconcilable perceptions of the social value of research in provincial health facilities. This study found that researchers tended to emphasize the contribution of research to the generation of knowledge and to the health of future patients while gate-keepers of health facilities tended to emphasize its contribution to the healthcare system and to current patients. (...) Furthermore, relations between research stakeholders were perceived to be somewhat fragile, making it difficult for stakeholders to achieve consensus about the social value of research, as well as on ways to maximize value. Interventions to negotiate a shared perspective on the social value of research would appear to be warranted, and the findings of this study suggest some focus areas for such intervention. (shrink)

The halal food markets, catering to the dietary concerns of Muslims, have grown worldwide. Literature has discussed growing halal markets, particularly meat, and competing forms of certification to address quality and other concerns of Muslim consumers. Yet, discussions about genetically engineered (GE) food in the Muslim world are comparatively new. The GE debates also do not address diversity of opinions in the Islamic world about the halal status of GE food despite efforts to reach a consensus. This paper integrates debates (...) on GE food and halal certification. It focuses on three major issues: The factors that affect the growth of halal markets, different interpretations of GE food in the Islamic world, and the reasons for lack of consensus on the halal status of GE food through a case study of Turkey. It argues that fragmented halal markets, in which diverse actors from the state to the industry have different interests, and the complexity of GE food make it difficult to reach a consensus on the halal status of GE food. Divergence on the halal status of GE food presents further challenges for Muslim consumers who desire to access healthy and religiously proper food in global agri-food systems. (shrink)

The success of Discourse Ethics is premised on the discovery and use of shared values. If this is true what type of negotiation style, especially when used in an intercultural setting, is best suited to make use of shared values. Research focusing on moral arguments between Germans and Americans uncovered an array of shared values. But the existence of shared values, by itself, was not an adequate predictor of a negotiation's success. What did prove to be a predictor of success (...) was the use of a Constructivist style of negotiation by both parties. (shrink)

The US National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project aims to use genomic techniques to understand the microbial communities that live on the human body. The emergent field of microbiome science brought together diverse disciplinary perspectives and technologies, thus facilitating the negotiation of differing values. Here, we describe how values are conceptualized and negotiated within microbiome research. Analyzing discussions from a series of interdisciplinary workshops conducted with microbiome researchers, we argue that negotiations of epistemic, social, and institutional values were inextricable (...) from the reflective and strategic category work that defined and organized the microbiome as an object of study and a potential future site of biomedical intervention. Negotiating the divergence or tension between emerging scientific and regulatory classifications also activated “values levers” and opened up reflective discussions of how classifications embody values and how these values might differ across domains. These data suggest that scholars at the intersections of science and technology studies, ethics, and policy could leverage such openings to identify and intervene in the ways that ethical/regulatory and scientific/technical practices are coproduced within unfolding research. (shrink)

Chinese negotiators are known to have a negotiation emphasis that differs from their Western counterparts, especially in issues of face and conflict. These values, however, are not monolithic, and can change depending on the negotiation circumstance. This research examines how negotiation tactics changes when Chinese negotiators are faced with counterparts from near and distant cultures. An online conjoint simulation drew 351 respondents in Taiwan to test subjective perceptions of counterparts from the USA and Japan. Chinese respondents exhibited increased cultural accommodation (...) when the counterpart's culture was more distant – paying more attention to sacrificing self-interest and saving face for the other side. Integration in the negotiation was emphasized across both near and distant cultures above that observed for negotiation with Chinese counterparts. Saving face, ignoring conflict, and domination tactics were consistently valued, irrelevant of culture. Masculinity among Chinese respondents was exhibited in a preference for integration with male counterparts, especially for Chinese male negotiators. Results indicate practical considerations when preparing for negotiation with a Chinese counterpart by considering inconsistencies in preferences while also considering consistent values. (shrink)

Philosophers of language and metaethicists are concerned with persistent normative and evaluative disagreements – how can we explain persistent intelligible disagreements in spite of agreement over the described facts? Tim Sundell recently argued that evaluative aesthetic and personal taste disputes could be explained as metalinguistic negotiations – conversations where interlocutors negotiate how best to use a word relative to a context. I argue here that metalinguistic negotiations are neither necessary nor sufficient for genuine evaluative and normative disputes to occur. A (...) comprehensive account of value talk requires stronger metanormative commitments than metalinguistic negotiations afford. (shrink)

Interpretation groups, which meet on a regular basis for jointly analysing qualitative data, are well-established in sociology and related disciplines. There are currently at least 71 interpretation groups in German-speaking countries, and there are more if one includes project teams, which meet on a regular basis for data sessions. Yet, there is relatively little knowledge based on empirical research about these groups and their practices. Inspired by studies on social sciences and humanities, this article examines how “good” interpretations are jointly (...) created in these groups. Prior studies underlined that social scientific methods are productive, i.e., performative. Following this lead, my study turns data analysis in qualitative research into an object of inquiry by investigating how interpretation groups work on textual data. More specifically, this article discusses how these groups negotiate different interpretative options and at the same time evaluate the quality of their results as well as the interpretation process as a whole. In this regard, the approach presented in this article also contributes to the growing literature on valuation and evaluation in science by focusing on communicative devices for valuing and evaluating interpretations. (shrink)

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs. Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid (...) polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics. Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality. (shrink)

Issues of interest, identity and values intertwine in environmental conflicts, creating challenges that cannot generally be overcome using rationalities grounded in generalised argumentation and abstraction. To address the growing need to engage interests and identities along with plural values in the conservation of biodiversity and ecological systems, we introduce the concept of ‘appropriateness of actions’ and ground it in a relational understanding of environmental ethics. A determination of appropriateness for actions comes from combining outputs from value elicitation with those (...) of interest and identity negotiation in ways that are salient to specific people and their relationships to specific places. Drawing on the Blue Mountain Forest Partnership in the Pacific Northwest, we propose factors of success for supporting appropriate actions: 1) understanding context and identifying key stakeholders; 2) surfacing a diversity of interests and building system-level trust; 3) building empathy for different identities grounded in specific places; 4) eliciting diverse values and seeking to understand their links to worldviews and knowledge systems and; 5) seeking out appropriate actions. (shrink)

While multi-stakeholder partnerships are emerging as an increasingly popular approach to address grand challenges, they are not well studied or understood. Such partnerships are rife with difficulties arising from the fact that actors in the partnership have different understandings of the grand challenge based on meaning systems which have distinct and often opposing assumptions, values, and practices. Each partnership actor brings with them their individual values as well as the values and work practices of their home organization’s culture, alongside the (...) wider meaning systems present within the sectoral spaces in which each organization is situated—public, private, or nonprofit. Yet, there is little understanding of how actors in multi-stakeholder partnerships negotiate multi-level meaning systems to reach partnership goals. In this 16-month ethnographic study, we take up a negotiated culture perspective to holistically examine the negotiation of multi-level meaning related to a focal grand challenge in a multi-stakeholder partnership established to end homelessness in Western Canada. Based on our findings, we contribute a process model to explain the ongoing negotiation of multi-level meanings in multi-stakeholder partnerships working to address grand challenges. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with (...) age, health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

In a series of publications Burgess, Plunkett and Sundell have developed a metalinguistic negotiation view that they call ‘Conceptual Ethics.’ I argue that their position adequately captures our intuition that some cases of value disputes are metalinguistic, but that they reverse the direction of justification when they state that speakers ‘negotiate’ the best use of a term or concept on the basis of its prior social role. Borrowing ideas from Putnam, I instead suggest distinguishing two meanings of general terms (...) and value predicates. Core meaning represents the lowest common denominator between speakers and is primarily based on our needs to coordinate behavior. In contrast to this, the noumenal meaning of a general term or value predicate is intended to capture an aspect of reality and represents what a term really means. Like many other disputes about theoretical terms, terms for abstract objects, and predicates, metalinguistic value disputes are about noumenal meaning on the basis of a shared core meaning. This direction towards reality is what sets the account apart from mere metalinguistic negotiation. (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate how the language and reasonings that academics, developers, consumers, marketers, and journalists deploy to accept or reject AI as authentic intelligence has far-reaching bearing on how we understand our human intelligence and condition. The discourse on AI is part of what we call the “authenticity negotiation process” through which AI’s “intelligence” is given a particular meaning and value. This has implications for scientific theory, research directions, ethical guidelines, design principles, funding, media attention, and the (...) way people relate to and act upon AI. It also has great impact on humanity’s self-image and the way we negotiate what it means to be human, existentially, culturally, politically, and legally. We use a discourse analysis of academic papers, AI education programs, and online discussions to demonstrate how AI itself, as well as the products, services, and decisions delivered by AI systems are negotiated as authentic or inauthentic intelligence. In this negotiation process, AI stakeholders indirectly define and essentialize what being human(like) means. The main argument we will develop is that this process of indirectly defining and essentializing humans results in an elimination of the space for humans to be indeterminate. By eliminating this space and, hence, denying indeterminacy, the existential condition of the human being is jeopardized. Rather than re-creating humanity in AI, the AI discourse is re-defining what it means to be human and how humanity is valued and should be treated. (shrink)

This paper defends negotiation as a way of rationally overcoming disagreements. Negotiation is a type of dialogue where the parties begin with a conflict and a need for cooperation, and their main goal is to make a deal as reported (Walton and Krabbe 1995, p 72). It has been discussed whether differences of opinion can be shifted from persuasion to negotiation dialogue. If two parties disagree, is it reasonable to overcome their disagreement by employing negotiation? Van Laar and Krabbe (2018a) (...) argue that negotiation is the correct way to settle disagreements when the parties arrive at a stalemate. Godden and Casey (2020) deny this. They argue that the goal of persuasion dialogue (to resolve a conflict by verbal means) can never be replaced by a bargaining procedure. This paper claims that shifts to negotiation are reasonable, but only if the shift meets two conditions. The practical condition requires the disagreement to be practical rather than theoretical, and the sacrifice condition requires that the parties freely agree to shift the dialogue to negotiation. When the parties do not meet these conditions, they commit fallacies such as ad consequentiam, ad baculum or the fallacy of middle ground. Finally, I argue that negotiation arises in practical argumentation when the parties assign different relative values to their goals. When this process occurs, we see negotiation as a small step within the practical argumentation process. Persuasion, deliberation and negotiation dialogue are, then, deeply intertwined and are sometimes indistinguishable. (shrink)

Chinese negotiators are known to have a negotiation emphasis that differs from their Western counterparts, especially in issues of face and conflict. These values, however, are not monolithic, and can change depending on the negotiation circumstance. This research examines how negotiation tactics changes when Chinese negotiators are faced with counterparts from near and distant cultures. An online conjoint simulation drew 351 respondents in Taiwan to test subjective perceptions of counterparts from the USA and Japan. Chinese respondents exhibited increased cultural accommodation (...) when the counterpart's culture was more distant – paying more attention to sacrificing self-interest and saving face for the other side. Integration in the negotiation was emphasized across both near and distant cultures above that observed for negotiation with Chinese counterparts. Saving face, ignoring conflict, and domination tactics were consistently valued, irrelevant of culture. Masculinity among Chinese respondents was exhibited in a preference for integration with male counterparts, especially for Chinese male negotiators. Results indicate practical considerations when preparing for negotiation with a Chinese counterpart by considering inconsistencies in preferences while also considering consistent values. (shrink)

Ethical dilemmas are inescapable components of business negotiations. It is thus important for negotiators to understand the differences in what is ethically appropriate and what is not. This study explores the cross-cultural differences in business ethics between Canada and China by examining the perceived appropriateness of five categories of ethically questionable strategies often used in business negotiations. The results show that the Chinese are more likely to consider it appropriate to use ethically inappropriate negotiation strategies, but the impact of cultural (...) values on ethically inappropriate negotiation strategies is much stronger in Canada than in China when negotiators choose to use these strategies. In addition, there are more gender differences in Canada, where men are more likely to consider it appropriate to use ethically questionable strategies in all five categories than women; while in China no gender differences are found in the perceived appropriateness of using these strategies in all but one category. Implications are also discussed along with potential future research directions. (shrink)

The problem of value disagreement and contextualist, relativist and metalinguistic attempts of solving it are laid out. Although the metalinguistic account seems to be on the right track, it is argued that it does not sufficiently explain why and how disagreements about the meaning of evaluative terms are based on and can be decided by appeal to existing social practices. As a remedy, it is argued that original suggestions from Putnam's 'The Meaning of "Meaning"' ought to be taken seriously. (...) The resulting dual aspect theory of meaning can explain value disagreement in much the same way as it deals with disagreement about general terms. However, the account goes beyond Putnam's by not just defending a version of social externalism, but also defending the thesis that the truth conditional meaning of many evaluative terms is not fixed by experts either and instead constantly contested as part of a normal function of language. (shrink)

Ugar and Malele write that generic machine learning (ML) technologies for mental health diagnosis would be challenging to implement in sub-Saharan Africa due to cultural specificities in how those conditions are diagnosed. For example, they say that in South Africa, the appearance of ‘schizophrenia’ might be understood as a type of spiritual possession, rather than a mental disorder caused by a brain dysfunction. Hence, a generic ML system is likely to ‘misdiagnose’ persons whose symptomatology matches that of schizophrenia in the (...) South African context. The authors thus claim that ‘a generic or universal design cannot be effective given the heterogeneity of value judgements in defining what mental health disorders are in different contexts’.1 Should we take this to mean that ML systems ‘should not be designed with a generalised perception of mental disorders,’1 as the authors suggest? On the contrary, my view is that generic ML can be useful, with the caveat that issues of cultural sensitivity may engender translational challenges in various national and cultural contexts. Yet, if it can be demonstrated that a generic ML system can reliably and accurately pick up on shared symptomatologies across cultures despite what any individual or community might believe about their actual causes, this aspect is surely the function and value of diagnostic ML which we should take to matter. Cultural gaps in aetiological understandings of mental health conditions make it all the more important to advance generic ML as a calibrating diagnostic tool. In this commentary, therefore, I will endeavour to make a case for generic ML in mental healthcare. ### Aetiological (mis)understanding across cultures The fundamental complexity to which Ugar and Malele direct our attention is the fact that mental health conditions are attributed to variable causal explanations, rather than a …. (shrink)

Proposed changes to the Common Rule would require publicly funded researchers to disclose whether a subject's biospecimens could be used for commercial profit and whether the subject will share in those proceeds. Disclosing commercial interests will inform research participants that their tissue may have commercial value, a possibility that those individuals might not have previously considered. The proposed changes may then provide people with an opportunity to negotiate commercial rights in their biospecimens despite the well-accepted legal precedent that individuals (...) maintain no interests in their excised tissue. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) structure the linguistic landscape by reflecting certain beliefs and assumptions. In this paper, we address the risk of people unthinkingly adopting and being determined by the values or worldviews embedded in LLMs. We provide a Nietzschean critique of LLMs and, based on the concept of will to power, consider LLMs as will-to-power organisations. This allows us to conceptualise the interaction between self and LLMs as power struggles, which we understand as negotiation. Currently, the invisibility and incomprehensibility (...) of LLMs make it difficult, if not impossible, to engage in such negotiations. This bears the danger that LLMs make reality increasingly homogeneous by recycling beliefs and creating feedback loops that ultimately freeze power struggles and thus consolidate the status quo. In view of this, LLMs constrain self-formation. Based on our critique, we provide some recommendations on how to develop interactions with LLMs that enable negotiations that allow for different ways of being. (shrink)

Essentialists understand authenticity as an inherent quality of a person, object, artifact, or place, whereas constructionists consider authenticity as a social creation without any pre-given essence, factuality, or reality. In this paper, we move beyond the essentialist-constructionist dichotomy. Rather than focusing on the question whether authenticity can be found or needs to be constructed, we hook into the idea that authenticity is an interactive, culturally informed process of negotiation. In addition to essentialist and constructionist approaches, we discuss a third, less (...) well-known approach that cannot be reduced to any of the two forms. This approach celebrates the authenticity of inauthenticity by amplifying the made. We argue that the value of authenticity lies not in choosing for one of these approaches, but in the degree to which the process of negotiating authenticity enables a critical formation of selves and societies. Authenticity is often invoked as a method of social control or a mark of power relations: once something is defined as authentic, it is no longer questioned. Emerging technologies—especially data-driven technologies—have the capacity to conceal these power relations, propel a shift in power, and dominate authentication processes. This raises the question how processes of authentication can contribute to a critical formation of selves and societies, against the backdrop of emerging technologies. We argue in favor of an interactionist approach of authenticity and discuss the importance of creating space in authentication processes that are increasingly influenced by technology as an invisible actor. (shrink)

The classification of clinical problems, such as AIDS, requires choices. Choices are made on epistemic (i.e., knowledge-based) and non-epistemic (i.e., action-based) grounds. That is, the ways in which we classify clinical problems, such as AIDS, involve a balancing of different understandings of clinical reality and of clinical values among participants of the clinical community. On this view, the interplay between epistemic and non-epistemic interests occurs within the embrace of particular clinical contexts.The ways in which we classify AIDS is the topic (...) of this paper. We consider the extent to which we construct clinical reality; we examine a suggested classification of AIDS; and we conclude suggesting that the choice regarding how to classify AIDS is the result of negotiation among participants in the clinical community. (shrink)

In recent years, David Plunkett and Tim Sundell have published a series of interesting articles that made an original use of resources from linguistics and philosophy of language to reply to arguments for legal antipositivism, the thesis according to which moral or value facts are part of what determines what the law is in a given jurisdiction at a given time. Plunkett and Sundell’s strategy for resisting antipositivism appeals to the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, which incorporates the notion (...) of a metalinguistic or context disagreement. Sundell 2011 had argued that metalinguistic disagreements are a possible component of disputes about evaluative matters. A further notion deployed is that of conceptual ethics, an essential component of metalinguistic negotiations. This paper approaches a crucial concern about the deployment of both notions against disagreement-based arguments for legal antipositivism. Metalinguistic negotiations displace disagreements from the semantic to the metalinguistic level, but do not eliminate the appeal to moral or other normative reasons from legal disagreements. Conceptual ethics purports to be a normative activity, engaged with prescribing ways one ought to think and talk. On a broad understanding of legal reasoning and practice, metalinguistic negotiations and conceptual ethics are an integral part of it, and hence are consistent with evaluative and normative facts being essential to, and constitutive of, the law. Or so this paper argues. (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the study of negotiations in order to improve its value in helping to resolve conflict in a host of areas. Unfortunately, it has not been used sufficiently in handling some of the more difficult dilemmas in the field of civil rights. This paper attempts to analyze the evolution of collective bargaining and negotiations in the field of labor relations and makes historic comparisons between the contributions negotiations has made in labor relations and the (...) inadequacy of its use in civil rights conflict in the United States. The author believes that this failure of the parties in civil rights disputes to negotiate and to institutionalize that negotiating process in such disputes has resulted in divisions in the civil rights movement and in the failure to achieve some of the goals sought by civil rights supporters. The same lesson, the author claims, ought to be learned in the civil rights struggle in South Africa, otherwise the difficult fights involving the rights of Black and Coloured South African people will result in blood and frustration rather than meaningful progress. (shrink)

For far too many people for far too many years, schooling has been a debilitating, demoralizing, and ultimately dehumanizing experience. Make-shift, half-hearted, and watered-down reform measures have proved ineffective. Reform throws out the bath water, but keeps the baby. Radicalism recognizes not a baby but a beast lurks in the bath water and throws both out. This dramatic redefinition of schooling examines four models of dynamism as provided by Nietzsche, Whitehead, Dewey, and Freire. Nietzsche's af-firmation of dynamism is marred by (...) his elitism. Whitehead understands that inert cripple schooling. Without dialogue, ideas remain inert. Dewey misunderstands thinking and does not grasp its inherent double movement: toward order and disorder. Freire's pedagogy is transcended, with emphasis on negotiation between prime values. The final chapter expounds a radical pedagogy of dynamism. Miller argues that teaching and learning are not separate acts, but form a continuum. Within the teaching-learning continuum, all participants are spontaneous and receptive and seek to overcome fear of process, ambiguity, and doubt. The key to radical schooling is a pro-active stance toward creativity that allows for a dynamic integration of difference in dialogue. _Negotiating Toward Truth_ is a call to arms for all educators. The book asks us to look closely what is in the bath water and to have the courage to throw the beast out with the bath water. (shrink)

Values are numerous, interrelated and hard to discern in professional practice. This article reports on key findings from research into locating professional values within health social work practice in Aotearoa New Zealand. The research explores how 15 health social workers experience and negotiate value demands when working with newborn infants. A staged methodology underpinned by constructivist grounded theory was utilised to generate theoretical knowledge through two phases of semi-structured individual interviews. The research firmly located health social workers practice in (...) the middle ground of a complex, tension-ridden practice environment with health social workers courageously striving to balance competing requirements. Within a health model influenced by neoliberal policy, key tensions related to challenges faced due to professionals oversimplifying social circumstances in risk-laden situations. This resulted in issues of judgements, bias and racism being a central concern for the participants’ social work practice. Despite these tensions, the place of social justice as a primary organising value was affirmed by the research. A stronger focus on the profession’s values would strengthen the collective voice of health social workers and their identity, in order to better address the systemic drivers of health inequities. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews with thirty-six lesbians, this article offers a feminist qualitative analysis of lesbian conception practices. The article examines the ways lesbian actors negotiate biomedical discourse in ways that reveal the co-constitutiveness of nature and culture, bodies and technologies, and biomedical and subjective knowledge. The article offers the concept of hybrid technologies, which are described as lesbian pragmatic negotiations of shifting control loci of technoscience. The author argues that lesbians' pathways to pregnancy are characterized by a negotiation of (...) discursive elements from alternative health discourses and biomedical knowledge, of various forms of technology, and of what is often termed the authoritative, objective, and scientific with the subjugated, subjective, and the embodied. In doing so these actors complicate through multiple agencies what is often interpreted as a totalizing force of biomedicalization. (shrink)

Values such as respect for autonomy, safety, enablement, independence, privacy and social connectedness should be reflected in the design of social robots. The same values should affect the process by which robots are introduced into the homes of older people to support independent living. These values may, however, be in tension. We explored what potential users thought about these values, and how the tensions between them could be resolved. With the help of partners in the ACCOMPANY project, 21 focus groups (...) were convened in France, the Netherlands and the UK. These groups consisted of: older people, informal carers and formal carers of older people. The participants were asked to discuss scenarios in which there is a conflict between older people and others over how a robot should be used, these conflicts reflecting tensions between values. Participants favoured compromise, persuasion and negotiation as a means of reaching agreement. Roles and related role-norms for the robot were thought relevant to resolving tensions, as were hypothetical agreements between users and robot-providers before the robot is introduced into the home. Participants’ understanding of each of the values—autonomy, safety, enablement, independence, privacy and social connectedness—is reported. Participants tended to agree that autonomy often has priority over the other values, with the exception in certain cases of safety. The second part of the paper discusses how the values could be incorporated into the design of social robots and operationalised in line with the views expressed by the participants. (shrink)

This book persuasively shows that modern philosophical ways of knowing are not the only valid forms of knowledge that exist. Angela Roothaan argues for a critical reappraisal of indigenous ways of knowing and a need to overturn the politics of epistemology that sustain the modern system of knowledge with regard to its othering of indigenous outlooks of nature. According to Roothaan, this can be achieved by broadening our epistemological and moral vistas beyond the thin modern scientific view that circumscribes valid (...) knowledge merely to the empirical aspects of reality. Such broadening will make an intercultural environmental dialogue possible. (shrink)

The use of video for research purposes is something that has attracted ethical attention and debate. While the usefulness of video as a mechanism to collect data is widely agreed, the ethical sensitivity and impact of recording equipment is more contentious. In some clinical settings the presence of a camera has a dual role, as a portal to a reflecting team and as a recording device to obtain research data. Using data from one such setting, family therapy sessions, this article (...) shows how the role played by recording equipment is negotiated in the course of talk and other activities that constitute sessions. Analysis reveals that members of the therapy interaction orient in different ways and for different purposes to the value of recordings. The article concludes that there are layers of benefit to be derived from recording of clinical interactions, including for members themselves, and this has wider implications for the ways in which qualitative research designs in health sciences are evaluated. (shrink)

Ethics consultation at the bedside has been hailed as a better way than courts and ethics committees to empower patients and make explicit the value components of treatment decisions. But close examination of the practice of ethics consultation reveals that it in fact risks subverting those ends by interpolating a third (expert) party into the doctor-patient encounter. In addition, the practice of bioethics through consultation does the broader cultural work of fashioning a shared moral order in the face of (...) manifestly plural individual commitments. In doing so, however, bioethics furthers medicine's position as a privileged domain of public moral discourse in contemporary American society. (shrink)

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are (...) negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea. (shrink)

Authorship, as a form of professional recognition, is an important topic in the study of reward systems in science. Empirical studies have shown that reward systems in science vary by historical periods and institutional contexts. Yet existing theoretical perspectives prove inadequate in explaining these variations. This study extends existing literature by investigating organizational mechanisms that shape “cycles of credit” in science and local institutional logics of authorship practices. Qualitative analysis is primarily based on in-depth interviews with thirty-one life scientists from (...) an elite and a provincial university in China, a country that has undergone unparalleled growth in scientific productivity in the past decade. I identify two different institutional logics of authorship. In the elite university, a logic of “autonomy” prevails. Researchers tend to remain independent and equal in negotiated coalitions and give coauthorship credit based on individuals’ scientific contributions to each paper. By contrast, in the provincial university, a logic of “dependence” prevails. Research teams assign coauthorship credit based on members’ long-term contributions regardless of whether they are scientific or not. Organizational factors, including historical development path, resource distribution pattern, and incentive scheme, are crucial in shaping and maintaining these divergent logics. (shrink)

AbstractAgroecosystems in the Midwestern United States are undergoing changes that pressure farmers to adapt their farming practices. Because farmers decide what practices to implement on their land, there are needs to understand how they adapt to competing demands of changes in global markets, technology, farm sizes, and decreasing rural populations. Increased understanding of farmer decision-making can also inform agricultural policy in ways that encourage farmer adoption of sustainable practices. In this research we adopt a grounded view of farmers by interpreting (...) their decision-making through their stories of everyday life. We use a narrative analysis to identify recurrent themes that characterize farmer decisions as active negotiations between the demands of efficiency in maximizing crop yields with a desire to steward land through past, present, and future generations. Together these narratives portray farmer decisions as a place-making process that seeks compatibility among distinct aspirations for their land. (shrink)

In central definitions of shared decision-making within medical consultations we find the concept of negotiation used to describe the interaction between patient and professional in case of conflict. It has been noted that the concept of negotiation is far from clear in this context and in other contexts it is used both in terms of rational deliberation and bargaining. The articles explores whether rational deliberation or bargaining accurately describes the negotiation in shared decision-making and finds that it fails to do (...) so on both descriptive and normative grounds. At the end some notes on further analysis is given and it is suggested that the interaction is more accurately described in terms of an internal balancing of values like patient best interest, patient autonomy and patient adherence by the professional that is accepted by the patient. (shrink)

The debate about genetic modification (GM) can be seen as characteristic of our time. Environmental groups, in challenging GM, are also challenging modernist faith in progress, and science and technology. In this paper we use the case of New Zealand's Royal Commission on Genetic Modification to explore the application of science discourses as used by environmental groups. We do this by situating the debate in the framework of modernity, discussing the use of science by environmental groups, and deconstructing the science (...) discourses evident within environmental groups' submissions to the Commission. We find science being called into question by the very movement that has relied on it to fight environmental issues for many years. The environmental groups are challenging the traditional boundaries of science, for although they use science they also present it as a culturally embedded activity with no greater epistemological authority than other knowledge systems. Their discourses, like that of the other main actors in the GM debate, are thus part of the constant re-negotiation of the cultural construct of 'science'. (shrink)

Using a simulated two-party negotiation, we examined how trustworthiness and power balance affected deception. In order to trigger deception, we used an issue that had no value for one of the two parties. We found that high cognitive trust increased deception whereas high affective trust decreased deception. Negotiators who expressed anxiety also used more deception whereas those who expressed optimism also used less deception. The nature of the negotiating relationship (mutuality and level of dependence) interacted with trust and negotiators’ (...) affect to influence levels of deception. Deception was most likely to occur when negotiators reported low trust or expressed negative emotions in the context of nonmutual or low dependence relationships. In these relationships, emotions that signaled certainty were associated with misrepresentation whereas emotions that signaled uncertainty were associated with concealment of information. Negotiators who expressed positive emotions in the context of a nonmutual or high dependence relationship also used less deception. Our results are consistent with a fair trade model in which negotiator increases deception when contextual and interpersonal cues heighten concerns about exploitation and decrease deception when these cues attenuate concerns about exploitation. (shrink)

Reflecting on the past is often a critical ingredient for successful learning. The current research investigated how counterfactual thinking, reflecting on how prior experiences might have been different, motivates effective learning from these previous experiences. Specifically, we explored how the structure of counterfactual reflection – their additive (‘‘If only I had”) versus subtractive (‘‘If only I had not”) nature – influences performance in dyadic-level strategic interactions. Building on the functionalist account of counterfactuals, we found across two experiments that generating additive (...) counterfactuals about a previous negotiation produced an advantage for negotiators over their previous performance compared to subtractive counterfactuals, both in terms of obtaining value for oneself and conceiving creative agreements. Additive counterfactuals enabled negotiators to more effectively extract lessons from past experiences to improve their current negotiation performance. (shrink)

This essay looks to the complex intercultural relations of China and Korea to highlight two important issues in political theory and international relations: the transnational nature of world politics and the limits of analytical binaries such as East‐West and tradition‐modernity. Discussions of international politics in East Asia characteristically address issues of security and development studies. More recently, Confucianism has been mobilized as part of the clash of civilizations of Asia with the West. This essay will consider how cultural boundaries are (...) negotiated within the region via an analysis of the workings of the transnational discourse of Confucianism in the construction of Korean identity. While many make truth claims about what ‘Confucianism’ means in Korea, this essay examines the discursive economies of ‘Confucian events’ in three overlapping social spaces: official, mass media, and academic. This essay will show the diversity of Confucianism within East Asia, and underline how rather than being a simple orthodoxy, the shape of Confucianism is an active political issue. While many try to define a core ‘Korean Confucianism’, I argue that we should use Confucianism as an analytical tool to understand something else, citing how some scholars are using Confucianism for the specific project of building democracy in Korea. (shrink)