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of the group can play devil s advocate. Finally, the group can survey all
the warning signals at a special meeting and open up a second round of
discussions after that.
189
Leading a delegation
Sources used in this chapter
" Janis, Irving: Groupthink , Psychology Today Magazine, June (1971), 322-329.
" Müller, Werner, Verhalten in der Gruppe ( Group Behaviour ) Management-III-Reader
(Centre St Economics and Business Administration, University of Basle) (1992), 55-61.
190
10
Interest groups
and the public
Negotiations seldom take place in a vacuum. Even in the simplest of sit-
uations the two parties need to take certain considerations into account:
their positions, objectives, strategies or conduct are in part determined
from outside of them, so to speak. If I want to buy a new car, my wife s
preferences will automatically be a part of the equation she may even
want to be present when the choice of model is made, that is to say at the
negotiation at the motor showroom. And while such situations can be
difficult enough in the private sphere, they become much more compli-
cated at the business level. The buyer for a chain of stores doesn t pur-
chase 5,000 pairs of trainers on his own account, but on behalf of the com-
pany he works for. As such, the freedom of movement he is given by the
store will have certain limitations. The more important the business at
hand, the higher the level at which he needs to consult the decision-mak-
ers, and first sell them his ideas at the internal level. This is also true for
the diplomat involved in preliminary negotiations for a free trade agree-
ment, say, who will need to consult with his superiors every step of the
way (while the latter have to do the same with respect to their respective
governments). Even the president or chief executive officer of a compa-
ny cannot act completely independently of his board of directors or the
company s shareholders. Depending on their degree of involvement,
these groups will attentively follow the course of business and the mar-
ket quotations and intervene as they think fit at the very least the man-
aging director must reckon with this as a possibility. So in the private
economy, too, important agreements very often involve internal negotia-
tions with major interest groups or mandators in the same camp. Figure
10-1 shows how these double-edged interactions effectively consist of at
least two different sets of negotiations, one against the other side, and the
191
Interest groups and the public
Figure 10-1 The negotiator as broker between constituencies
(after Lewicki and Litterer, 1985)
Mandator Mandator
(constituency) (constituency)
External negotiations
Negotiators
AB
Internal Internal
negotiation negotiation
other with and sometimes against the internal constituencies. Thus both
principal negotiators might have to negotiate internally with their
respective mandators or interest groups (e.g. other government min-
istries or other company business units).
The need to take all these additional people and groups into account
has a considerable impact on the situation of the negotiator. Bilateral
negotiations can take on a multilateral air even when no other parties are
officially involved. The nature of such negotiations changes, too: it is as
though suddenly additional participants had come to the conference
table. All this makes for considerably more complex and difficult negoti-
ations.
Any negotiations that have social, political or economic significance
will of course come under the spotlight of public opinion and the media.
As a result, the mandators and the constituent members of the oppo-
nent s camp can be specifically targeted and influenced. We shall deal
with these later in a separate section. The main purpose of the present
chapter is to give an indication of the enormous impact that stakeholder
groups can exert on the negotiators behaviour and the course and out-
come of their negotiations.
192
Interest groups and the public
Stakeholder groups
Most negotiations and decisions on the part of companies, public author-
ities, associations or states, and even of private individuals, have an
impact to some degree on other people. The construction of a conven-
tional chemical factory with its smoking chimneys, to take a rather dras-
tic example, threatens to harm the well-being and health of the local pop-
ulation. The local people, for their part, are likely to take whatever
measures they feel necessary with or without the support of official
agencies to ensure that their interests are sufficiently taken into
account, at the latest when the required construction and operating per-
mits are issued.
Interest groups may even be involved before the land has been pur-
chased. So the multinational chemical concern is sitting down at the
negotiating table not only with Farmer Giles, who owns the land, but
indirectly also with the environmental agencies and associations as well
as with various citizens or nature conservation groups, for example.
These will represent the interests of the local population, the natural site,
the ground water, the nesting birds or so as not to leave the interests of
the other side unmentioned the concerns of the local small business
committee and the other land-owners of the district. Everybody will
have good reasons why the factory should (new jobs, municipal trade
tax, increase in land value, state incentives) or should not (quality of life,
nature protection, concern for future generations) be built. The lives of all
of them are directly affected by the object of the negotiations.
So these groups bring their very different demands to the table the
right to clean air, pure drinking water, multiplicity of natural species, as
well as the right to work, economic growth or speculative profits from
rising land prices. A number of these interests may at first sight appear
exaggerated, perhaps even extraordinarily naive or quite selfish but it
is impossible to brush them aside. Some of them indeed immediately
strike us as being fully justified. It is for this reason that we call their sup-
porters and representatives stakeholder groups. But while even personal
interests may be involved, this does not by any means preclude their
validity or the possibility of power behind them. The aims of these indi-
vidual groups, like their interests, thus regularly clash or at least compete
with one another. Whether the demand for clean air or the acute need for
193
Interest groups and the public
more workplaces finally wins the day is a matter for social negotiation.
The opposing forces of the various interest groups will each in their way
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