I don’t intend to belabor the "quality" issue; it serves here merely as a familiar proxy for a whole range of other subject matter that has not yet been addressed effectively because of the difficulties of getting functional scholar/practitioner partnerships going.

An effort at mutual understanding
This issue of Mediation Quarterly represents a deliberate juxtaposition of researchers’ and practitioners’ thinking. The present occasion lends itself unusually well to a discussion of some attitudes which turn out to be sharply different between people inclined toward practice and those more drawn to scholarship. I now believe, for example, that the difficulties of the theory/practice relationship are due, as much as anything else, to a difference in what typical scholars and practitioners see as the "origin of wisdom." But since I am myself a practitioner, I cannot hope to prove this assertion; I write here merely as an essayist, and leave the reader to judge for yourself whether this "makes sense" (if you’re a practitioner) or "fits with the known data" (if you’re a researcher.)

A revelation of character
Even a cursory review of the papers which make up this special issue suggests that people do not make a choice between a scholarly and a practical career lightly. This goes back to first principles: For highly talented people, who have more options than most (and who are, in this field, almost by definition not greedy) that choice is likely to have a lot to do with what kind of work they think is important, and answers both a personal and a societal need.

Of course, there isn’t a perfect dichotomy between academics and practitioners, in this special issue or anywhere else. Those represented here actually cover a spectrum, from solo practitioner (e.g. Coates) through program manager (e.g. Smith) and administrator of a large system (Press), to people who are as close to pure scholarship as is likely to be found in this field. But as first the scholarly papers and then the commentaries came in, I was struck by the consistency with which one might identify where the writer fit on the scholar-practitioner spectrum by the way he or she addressed the issues—and in the case of the commentators, by which, of a variety of issues raised by each paper, drew her interest.

The frames of reference of the commentators are instructively different. For example Christine Coates, a solo practitioner, has strong national/institutional affiliations—yet it is clear she writes as an individual, with individual concerns and with a strong connection to her experience base. Sharon Press, by contrast, who administers the largest dispute resolution system in any jurisdiction I am aware of, takes a much more birds-eye view. Coates uses as the grounding of her comments her personal experience with cases, even though she has held significant responsibility in the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts and other organizations; Press speaks in terms of policy and aggregate case handling, even though she is an able mediator as an individual. The other papers here also show, beyond their separate subject matter, how someone who knows more about the subject than most chooses how to react, what to react to and what to ignore, based on criteria that relate as much to who she is professionally as to any abstract conception of "logic." Our daily frames of reference follow us on to the printed page.

In many social and political settings, the extremes are thinly populated, and it’s the shifts at the center that make the difference. But here, it’s the contrast at the extremes that matters; the middle ground, though strongly represented in this special issue, is atypical of working professionals both in practice settings and in the academy. Admittedly, many practitioners teach part-time, and many more earn part of their living as trainers. But from my (undisciplined) observation, though those courses have their strengths, a visible relationship between to the best in new scholarship isn’t normally one of them. At the same time, the number of academics who regard themselves as practitioners is much larger than the number among them who are regarded as effective practitioners by practitioners. In both instances, most of those concerned seem to carry the precepts of their main occupation with them in their forays "across the boundary." Those who truly amalgamate lessons from both domains into their daily work are much rarer.

Quite apart from their merits as individual works—which I think are considerable—reading these papers and commentaries has provided an important clue to the puzzle that faces the Theory to Practice project. If typical scholars see "truth" as deriving from careful comparison of many pieces of data, whether collected personally or not, typical practitioners are unlikely to interest them much as sources of wisdom; what the practitioner has to offer is direct and singular experience, and that, in the lexicon of the scholar, seems to make you a "subject," not a partner.

By the same token, if the practitioner’s definition of "truth" is derived primarily from personal action and direct observation, and wisdom constitutes the aggregate of a long series of such truths, the academic’s whole structure of wisdom—derived, as it must be, at best from observation but mostly from other means—is inherently likely to be seen as pallid and unpersuasive. To me-as-practitioner, in other words, my own accumulated cases (though the messages I draw from them may conflict) are seen as a 100% reliable source of knowledge and inspiration—because I was there. My closest colleagues’ anecdotal reports of their cases, meanwhile, are hearsay.... Even if I am relatively open to their experiences, and am willing to give them as much as a 40% "validity rating" (many mediator-mentors would say that those apprenticed to them seemed willing to accept far less), beyond those close colleagues the inverse square rule is likely to apply. Truly secondary sources, such as articles in this (practitioner-oriented) journal, are yet further removed from this concept of "truth." By this reckoning, the typical academic study must cross a something of a psychological galaxy to make an impression. At such distance, no wonder few academic stars shine all that brightly to our typical practitioner colleagues.

Getting past "Why bother?"
I don’t propose for a minute to ignore the career and economic disincentives to effective academic/practitioner collaboration, as noted above (Honeyman, 1998.) But the focus right now is on the psychological disincentives. These, at least, could potentially be addressed by making better use of atypical individuals or of atypical situations. That is what we have tried to do in this special issue.

The process of discussion which led to this issue may therefore be worth noting. It started with something of an accident; perhaps, for real practitioner/scholar collaboration to occur, it will be essential for all involved to be open to such serendipity and see value in it. Let me "paint the scene" a bit.

A pub, in Glasgow, the summer of 1996. A group of academics, and I, are having a quick one following two back to back presentations at the Law & Society Association conference there. All of those present had given presentations or papers on mediation, most of them papers summarizing ethnographic or linguistic studies. One scholar asks—would the assembled group be interested in combining forces for purposes of a book, or maybe a special issue of a journal? They would. Turns are taken around the room as each person is invited to describe what his or her chapter might look like. Eventually it gets to me. But I’m a practitioner; I do not perform ethnographic or linguistic studies, and my paper had been on an unrelated matter. Yet the opportunity seems ripe to raise another issue of personal concern—the relationship between practitioners, researchers and theorists of dispute resolution, and what might be done to improve it. Presently, we come to an agreement that incorporates a wrap-up paper in the series, on the general theme of "So who cares about ethnographic and linguistic studies of mediation, anyway?"

Many discussions later, this special issue is the result of that incident. As it has turned out, it was providential that the original papers were on a wide range of subjects and that they were produced by a grab-bag of scholars from different fields, different countries and different strains of experience. Luck, again, resulted in the addition of one paper produced by a group of practitioners, at Mediation Center in Minneapolis: Ethnographic studies produced by practitioners in mediation are few and far between, and this one I believe to be significant. And luck once more: The casual last-minute addition of Nancy Welsh to a "let's get this done" discussion between Robert Dingwall, Michael Lang and me, in Pittsburgh a year later, led to Nancy's idea to get a practitioner to comment on each academic piece, and to get an academic to comment on the one practitioner piece. Now we had a structure that was truly something new. The scholars involved got interested in this idea, and subsequently undertook unusual efforts to write for a practitioner audience. Several of the papers were extensively reworked (no equations here, not too much jargon.) Others were drastically shortened. And the volume of footnotes is down.

But still, to return to my thesis, the scholars share a perspective distinct from the general orientation of the practitioners commenting on their work. That perspective I’ll call "detached analysis." I’ve noted above how the scholars’ typical focus differs from that of the typical commentator in this issue. But the difference in perspective is also quite apparent if you compare the Dingwall–Greatbatch–Ruggierone paper, or the Long–Fabricius–Musheno–Palumbo contribution, with the approach and visible concerns of Welsh–Lewis. Mediation Center, a practitioner group, has to think about the practical implications for its business of the discoveries they have made concerning preferred conflict resolution styles in the three ethnically diverse communities they studied. For a practitioner group to produce such a paper at all is highly unusual; for one to take such a degree of detachment that it can afford to defer worrying about where the chips land is impossible. They cannot simply study and report what is; they must therefore also ask what it means for mediators and ADR programs. A direct series of consequences in case management, party contacts, mediator selection and training, and marketing are too obviously at stake. This remains true despite the high level of intellectual integrity which I find in their work—evidenced, more than anything, by the palpably uncomfortable conclusions they reach. Thus, although the Mediation Center paper points out some problems in the standard lore of mediation, their programmatic responsibilities lead the authors to be quick to propose alternatives.

How rare must it be?
This issue of MQ stands for something else, too: It unfortunately demonstrates just how much work it is to create a product requiring collaboration among disparate kinds of people. Two years have elapsed since the idea of some kind of joint publication of these papers was first broached. The process was far from smooth going. Those involved think (I think) that the effort was worth it. And perhaps the necessary level of effort could be somewhat reduced with experience. Yet it’s unlikely that so complex a structure can ever be produced as easily as an unrelated group of papers that do not require extensive coordination.

"Coordination," in fact, seems to be the operative word for any effort that draws together academics and practitioners—because, for the reasons discussed, it seems to be psychologically unnatural to most members of either group to make the effort at working with the other without such labors. That, of course, raises the question of whether there exists anybody to whom it is professionally natural to work in that breach, and to help to narrow it.

A manifesto for the bridge people
I believe there is, in fact, a small population of professionals—some employed in academia, some not—who see this kind of work as close to their professional core. One reason why I believe that is that I keep running into them; in fact, the initial design for the Researcher’s Guide to Dispute Resolution Practitioners, a directory of 78 expert practitioners who have committed to responding fast to requests for advice from scholars, seemed incomplete until a section was added explicitly consisting of "bridge" people.

They have been, in my view, a long-suffering and under-appreciated group. Perhaps this is partly because their orientation seems fey to many full-time practitioners, and unscientific to many full-time researchers; neither fish nor fowl, their reputations grow among a small group of cognoscenti even as their sources of financing, their scope of work, and sometimes their careers suffer from the incomprehension of their immediate colleagues.

In dispute resolution, as in older fields, we have encouraged the creation of a whole slew of institutions, structures and methods that implicitly value the contributions of scholars and practitioners quite separately, and thus devalue the efforts of those who try to work across both domains. I submit that it’s time to analyze those structures and address ways in which, by frustrating the ability of the "bridge" people to function at their best, they defeat our fundamental purposes. I hope that the series of papers presented here will be seen beyond the papers’ individual merits as an unexpected fusion, showing researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives in a larger sense, and challenging each group to perceive more and to be more open to the potential contributions of the other. Our field does not have resources to waste; perhaps this series can strike a few sparks for others so that they, in turn, will think of more occasions for developing scholar-practitioner working relationships, more comprehensive ways of examining and improving their own researches and practices, and more opportunities to get better use out of their "opposite numbers."

REFERENCES

Coates, C. (1998). Commentary on Dingwall et al. Mediation Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4.

Dingwall, R., Greatbatch, D., and Ruggierone, L. "Divorce mediation: Micro-studies and macro-issues." Mediation Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4.

Herrman, M., Gale, J., Hollett, N., Goettler, D., Kogan, S., Fogarty, K., and Dismuke, K. (1998). "Interim report of the mediator skills project: Assessing and supporting effective mediation." State Justice Institute.

Honeyman, C. (1988). "Five elements of mediation." Negotiation Journal 4: 149-158.

Kakalik, J. S., Dunworth, T., Hill, L. A., McCaffrey, D., Oshiro, M., Pace, N. M., and Vaiana, M. E. (1996). Just, Speedy, and Inexpensive? An Evaluation of Judicial Case Management Under the Civil Justice Reform Act. Institute for Civil Justice, RAND Corp.

Press, S. (1998). Commentary on "The name of the game is movement: concession seeking in judicial mediation of large money damage cases," by Stacy Burns. Mediation Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4.

Test Design Project (1995). Performance-based assessment: a Methodology, for use in selecting, training and evaluating mediators. Washington, DC: National Institute for Dispute Resolution.