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...