Theory
and Practice
in Conflict Resolution
Background
Translating research into practitioners' language
Selected publications
Events and Presentations
Public sessions
Doing it yourself
Background
"Theory to Practice", a national project, was funded by the William and
Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop more sophisticated and more consistent
linkages between those who conceptualize new ideas for handling human
conflict, and those who practice as neutrals—and advocates—throughout this
field. Christopher Honeyman, managing partner of CONVENOR,
was the project's director and principal investigator, and Mediation Center
(Hamline University, St. Paul, MN) was the grant administrator. The initial
term of the project was two years (1997-99), and in 1999 the Foundation
awarded a major grant for a further three years. In 2002 the project was
succeeded by the "Broad Field" project.
At the UMass/Boston meeting described below:
Morton Deutsch and colleagues
more pictures
"Theory to Practice" benefited greatly from its
expert steering committee, including both
scholars and practitioners drawn from diverse backgrounds—and from a long
list of colleagues in a wide variety of practice and academic settings.
Below you can find a summary of the major outputs and results, including
links to some of the project's publications. Others concern translating
research into practitioners' language, and will be found at the page of that
title.
Translating Research into practitioners' language
At a Theory to Practice discussion held at RAND's Institute for Civil
Justice, a highly experienced economist remarked "When I write, almost the
entire length of the report is an effort to demonstrate how and why I
reached my conclusions, because I know that some other scholar is going to
challenge my methodology. But for a reader who doesn't care about that, the
essentials could be said in a page or two."
The Translating Research
page offers several examples of how long, complex and sometimes—gasp!—turgid
research reports can be rewritten to make their essential content more
accessible. It also incorporates a list of research "FAQs"
for conflict resolution issues.
Selected
Publications
Here There Be Monsters,
by Christopher Honeyman, Bobbi McAdoo and Nancy Welsh (with dozens of
colleagues participating), draws together what we have learned in years of
work on creating better integration of scholars' and practitioners'
knowledge across the conflict resolution field. It became the principal
article in The Conflict Resolution Practitioner, a monograph
published by the Office of Dispute Resolution, Supreme Court of Georgia to
highlight the need for integration of scholarship and practical wisdom in
conflict resolution.
Cracking the Hard-Boiled
Student
is a nuts-and-bolts description of the experiments that led to
creation of exercises that "get across" important social psychology findings
relevant to practice, but rarely read by practitioners. By Jeffrey M. Senger
and Christopher Honeyman, and published in the monograph described above,
The Conflict Resolution Practitioner.
Not Quite
Protocols: Toward Collaborative Research in Dispute Resolution
describes one of the Theory to Practice
project's "moveable feasts" -- an effort to start to define terms on which
scholars and practitioners might work together more productively, in the
face of working environments on both sides whose influence can be insidious.
By Christopher Honeyman, Barbara McAdoo and Nancy Welsh, with 21
colleagues.
This article was first published in Conflict
Resolution Quarterly, Fall 2001.
Have Gavel, Will Travel: Dispute Resolution’s Innocents Abroad
describes another moveable feast, to begin to examine the risks created by
American conflict resolution practitioners and scholars working abroad --
often, in cultures they don't take the time to understand. By
Christopher Honeyman and Sandra Cheldelin This article was
originally published in Conflict Resolution Quarterly, Spring 2002.
The Wrong Mental
Image of Settlement discusses a distortion in what people think
"settlement" means --- a distortion that has serious consequences for the
field. By Christopher Honeyman. This article was
originally published in Negotiation Journal, January 2001.
System Disorders:
Trying to Build Resolution into Managed Care
is the report of another "moveable feast" --- this time, examining the huge
but often hidden problems created by disputes among health care
professionals as well as between HMOs and their plan participants. By Brad
Honoroff and Christopher Honeyman. This article was first published in
Alternatives, October 2001.
Guide to
Dispute Resolution Practitioners and Researchers
The most thorough directory of sophisticated mediators and other neutrals in
the field. This, the third edition, is incorporated into the CRInfo
database. It includes a "reverse directory" of highly regarded scholars and
researchers willing to hear from practitioner groups, and a cross-index
intended to serve, in effect, as the field's first speaker's bureau.
The current Guide (3rd ed., 2001) replaces the
former Researcher's Guide to Dispute Resolution Practitioners
(Honeyman, C., Hamline University, 1997), adding dozens of scholars who
specialize in many different aspects of the field, and cross-indexing both
practitioners and scholars who are willing to accept speaking engagements.
ADR
Practitioners and Researchers in a "Moveable
Feast"
This article by Chris Honeyman describes why it was necessary to invent a
new kind of encounter to get some key discussions going seriously. It
appeared in the June, 1999 issue of Alternatives to the High Costs of
Litigation (CPR, New York).
Theory v. Practice in Dispute
Resolution
The initial article describing the Theory to Practice project was
published in the July-August 1997 issue of Alternatives to the High Cost
of Litigation, the newsletter of the CPR Institute for Dispute
Resolution, New York. The version shown here has been slightly updated.
A special issue of Mediation Quarterly on
the project appeared in Summer 1998. For the first time, this juxtaposed
significant scholarly analyses of particular aspects of dispute resolution
with the reactions of expert practitioners.
Frames of Reference is
Christopher Honeyman's anchor article in the special issue, and discusses
some psychological disincentives that impede communication between scholars
and practitioners.
Not Good For Your Career
This Honeyman article explores some of the disincentives
practitioners and academics face when contemplating working together.
Published January 1998 in Negotiation Journal.
Confidential, more or
less
This short Honeyman article on the disparity
between both the academic and
the usual practitioner perceptions of what can be kept confidential in
mediation, and the realities, was published in the American Bar
Association's Dispute Resolution Magazine
(January 1999, pp. 12-13.)
The Incredible
Disappearing Profession
Another short Honeyman article, on the disparity between the ADR field's
development of quality control mechanisms and our failure to implement them
broadly, focuses on the consequences for how the field is beginning to be
perceived. Recently published in
CONSENSUS,
newsletter of the MIT Public Disputes Program
(Winter 1998-99.)
On covering
dispute resolution
This Honeyman article focuses on the need for
journalists to recognize a sea change in the handling of conflict for what
it is. Published in the January-February, 1999 issue of IRE Journal,
the newsletter of the society Investigative Reporters and Editors. A version
modified to address dispute resolution practitioners' interests was
published as "Viewpoint: On covering dispute resolution--How to
report on a systemic change in the legal process" in the August 4,
1999 issue of ADR Report (Pike & Fischer / BNA.)
Events and
Presentations (examples from among many)
- Hewlett Theory Centers Conference, March 2002,
New York. As the closing event of the five-year project, Theory to
Practice collaborated with two Hewlett Theory Centers (CUNY-DRC
at the City University of New York, and the
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
at George Mason University) to host the 2002 conference of the nineteen
academic centers funded by the Hewlett Foundation to develop new theory
in conflict resolution. This innovative meeting used the deep expertise
in practical conflict handling developed by four highly varied
"communities of practice" in New York to challenge scholars to make more
consistent and more creative use of practitioners' experience. Both the
formative questions (What don't we know? What do we need to know?
How would we find out?) and the approach taken were designed to
create a straightforward and real discussion between experts from many
practical and academic domains over several days, as a spur to new
thinking. By two months later, dozens of short articles resulting from
this meeting were already being compiled. (A description of the meeting
by Russ Bleemer, editor of CPR's
Alternatives, can be found in the
journal's April, 2002 issue, Vol. 20, No. 4, pp. 83-86.)
The outputs of this meeting are part of a transition from Theory to
Practice to its successor, the
Broad Field project. Further details
will be found at that project's page when they become public. In
particular, please look for a forthcoming special issue of
Negotiation Journal
(Fall, 2002) which will be devoted to this discussion.
- A special two-day conference, on one
book. In May, 2000, a group of several dozen people met at
Columbia Law School to celebrate the publication of The Handbook of
Conflict Resolution, edited by Morton Deutsch and Peter Coleman,
and to begin to discuss how the rich ideas contained in that volume
might be turned into working materials that could be readily used in
teaching, training, and practice. The meeting was a collaboration
between the Theory to Practice project and Columbia University's
multidisciplinary Conflict Resolution Network. In connection with the
larger meeting, a subgroup of seven scholars and practitioners also held
a planning meeting to design a more on-going project, which may last
several years. The object was to use lessons learned by working with the
Deutsch/Coleman volume to design training and teaching materials drawn
from additional sources.
The initial
outcome of this effort was a two-day conference, focused on the
Handbook, hosted by the University of Massachusetts/Boston on March 2-3,
2001. The basic idea of the conference was to assemble
cross-disciplinary groups to create teaching, training, and practice
materials, based on the Handbook, on the spot. By tackling a
single—though, with 27 chapters and 37 authors, complex—work, we have
begun to build both a collaborative network and a systematic approach,
for translation of other major works into the interactive exercises and
other working tools that we think are necessary for widespread
dissemination of important research-based findings.
Article
- Theory to Practice "tracks" at national
conferences. At their combined 2000 conference, the Society of
Professionals in Dispute Resolution and the Conflict Resolution
Education Network featured nine sessions organized by Theory to
Practice, which highlighted unusual combinations of scholars and
practitioners, addressing cutting-edge issues. A similar effort was
mounted for the 2001 inaugural conference of SPIDR's successor, the
Association for Conflict Resolution.
- Nine sessions at a
regional conference. The Theory to Practice experiments at
the SPIDR/CREnet 2000 conference were based on experience gained at the
1999 annual conference hosted by the Wisconsin Association of Mediators
and co-sponsored by the mediator organizations of several other Midwest
states. That conference explicitly adopted "theory to practice" as its
special focus. The Theory to Practice project team presented a total of
nine sessions (eight workshops and a plenary session) on the issues
addressed by the project. As a result of this effort, the conference was
co-sponsored in 1999 not only by an unusual number of practitioner
organizations, but also by two academic groups -- the Institute for
Legal Studies of the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Marquette
University.
- A "research charrette" drawing scholars
and practitioners into collaboration in designing two major studies.
Theory to Practice joined with the Institute for Legal Studies of the
University of Wisconsin Law School to design and present
an unusual symposium. The symposium
involved a national group of 35 highly experienced scholars and
practitioners, addressing the question "What do we need to know about
dispute resolution that studying Florida's extraordinary experience
could tell us?" This was designed to follow up on an August, 1999
session which Chris Honeyman and Florida Dispute Resolution Center
Director (and SPIDR President) Sharon Press co-designed to provide the
Florida State Courts with a cross-section of expertise on how to design
a critically important study of a massive caseload.
- A
moveable feast
on an international issue.
One of nine such ventures was held in Washington in
February, 2000 in conjunction with the Institute for Conflict Analysis
and Resolution, George Mason University. This meeting focused on a
growing problem in the field: the problems of (and increasingly, created
by) U.S.-based professionals working abroad in conflict resolution. An
article describing
the discussion, by Christopher Honeyman and Sandra Cheldelin, appeared
in the Spring, 2002 issue of Conflict Resolution Quarterly.
- A moveable feast on health care
disputes.
Another of the moveable feast series was held in Boston in March, 2000.
Three to five representatives each from the Tufts Health Plan, Blue
Cross/Blue Shield of New England, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Plan (among
the largest and most innovative HMOs in New England) participated, along
with scholars and practitioners with a variety of sources of expertise.
Article
Public Sessions
Sessions exploring project issues were held at a number of national and
regional conferences, including:
- National Conference on Peacemaking & Conflict
Resolution, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (1997).
- Law & Society Association, St. Louis, Missouri
(1997), Snowmass, Colorado (1998), Chicago (1999), Miami (2000) and
Budapest (2001).
- Society of Professionals in Dispute Resolution,
Orlando, Florida (1997), Portland, Oregon (1998), Baltimore, (1999), and
Albuquerque (2000).
- Association for Conflict Resolution, Toronto
(2001).
- International Association for Conflict Resolution
(IACM), Cergy-Pontoise, France (2001).
- American Bar Association, Section on Conflict
Resolution conference, San Francisco (2000), Washington, DC (2001) and
Seattle (2002).
- Wisconsin Association of Mediators, Madison,
Wisconsin (1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001.)
Discussions were also held at a number of the
Hewlett Theory Centers and other major academic groups (including
Georgetown, ICAR/George Mason University, Institute for Civil Justice/RAND,
Institute for Legal Studies/University of Wisconsin, CUNY/John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, UCLA/Western Justice Center, Columbia Law School,
Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, and others.) Outstanding panels
of academics and practitioners assembled for these sessions, and the
resulting discussions were illuminating, but there are too many to reproduce
here.
Doing it Yourself
On September 24, 1998 the
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR)
at George Mason University, in conjunction with the District of
Columbia-area chapter of SPIDR and the Northern Virginia Mediation Service,
held a one-day regional symposium on the nexus
of theory and practice. The day's program is an example of what can be done
locally or regionally in a number of cities which incorporate both strong
communities of practitioners and significant numbers of academics interested
in dispute resolution. Now that Theory to Practice has completed its
five-year span (for its successor project, see
Broad Field) it is
especially important that others take action in this "space," and the many
groups who hosted "moveable feasts" and other events in collaboration with
the project have demonstrated repeatedly the interest that can be generated
locally. We look forward to receiving requests for advice in efforts that
develop from these early experiments for years to come -- and we encourage
readers of this page to consider what issues in your own city, practice
specialty or scholarly area might benefit from a practitioner/scholar
collaboration, and whom you might partner with... |