Conditions: The Anatomy of Negotiating Power

Abstract

The art and science of negotiation is largely a matter of storytelling. Not a great deal of rigorous theory construction and research is implicated. This state of affairs is frequently justified by the claim that negotiating is, in the final analysis, an “artistic” activity. Yet, ever since Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme was pleasantly surprised when his house philosopher confided to him that for the last 40 years he had “been making prose without knowing it”, we are perhaps allowed to say that there is enough logic in the art of negotiation to call it at least an object of scientific inquiry, without offending its artistic practitioners. All appears to depend on the perspective one chooses to look at the orchestration of negotiation games — top-down or bottom-up. In the words of an equity trader alias IT lobbyist, versed in “connecting” Silicon Valley economics with Washington politics (Miles, 2001: 240): “If you go to a rave it looks like chaos, and what appears to be chaos is structured. The old companies are going, ‘this is messy, this is overvalued, it doesn’t make sense’. Well, yeah. From the balcony it doesn’t make sense”.