Everyday Negotiation: Reaching a Broader Audience with Training in Negotiation

Abstract: This Roundtable addresses the great need to reach a much broader audience with negotiation training. Within universities, few, sometimes less than 2%, of students enroll – or have the opportunity to enroll – in courses that provide negotiation training. Moreover, across professions and disciplines, negotiation processes and goals vary greatly. Based on the panelists’ experience in teaching and training a variety of academic and professional audiences we have found that professionals and students in engineering may be more likely to avoid conflict but allow conflicts to fester, whereas students in business tend to focus more on competitive outcomes and use of distributive tactics, and lawyers tend toward more direct approaches to demand desired outcomes. Yet many people working for non-profits, for example, cannot afford the type of executive training offered by business programs such as Program on Negotiation, DRRC, or AC4.

This Roundtable, therefore, will ask a set of overarching question that address the why and how making negotiation research and training accessible and available to a much broader audience.

To this end, the discussants invited to take part in this roundtable discussion have worked on projects (e.g., grants, centers, and book projects) that are aimed at making negotiation knowledge and training more accessible. The goal of this roundtable is to delve into how we can reach a much broader professional and academic audience with what we know about conflict and negotiation.

Keywords: Negotiation, Research, Training, Access