Managing complexity

Abstract

Let a researcher open the file of a negotiation that did not lead to agreement and interview participants in that negotiation, and he is likely to be offered too many explanations for comfort rather than too few: interpersonal relations were unusually bad; the politics were intractable; party x or y was just unamenable to reason; small procedural incidents had major effects; the difficulties in the science and the technicalities of the topic being negotiated were too complicated or controversial; and so forth. Each such explanation seems sufficient alone to explain the absence of agreement. Paradoxically, however, since each one seems to do so as well as the next one, the researcher soon gets the impression he has opened Pandora's box and let out a web of complications that expands as he goes on with his interviews. Was the situation, then, or were the issues, just too complex to negotiate? What is the place of complexity in understanding the negotiation processes that did not lead to agreement? The aim of this chapter is to examine this question.