Learning Objectives

• • To understand what is culture and how does it impact negotiations

• • Evaluate the differential impact of cross-cultural negotiations on outcomes

• • Understand the role of communication in negotiations

• • Get familiar with self-serving biases in cross-cultural negotiations

• • Evaluate how emotions shape outcomes of negotiations

Opening Profile: The Free Trade Agreement between Canada and United States

On October 3, 1987, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) was signed by representatives of Canada and the United States after two strenuous years of intense negotiations. Canada could be described as a medium-sized economy. Its population is one-tenth the size of the United States, which is considered an economic superpower in comparison. More than 75 percent of its exports go to the United States making the United States Canada’s prime trading partner. By contrast, the United States was exporting less than 20 percent of its products to Canada.

A Royal Commission concluded that Canada’s only means to achieve this stability was to engage in an open free trade partnership with the United States.

The problem was that the United States wasn’t especially interested in such a free trade partnership agreement.

The first step that Canada took was in the form of preparation by developing a succinct plan. A chief negotiator, Simon Reisman, was appointed by the Canadian prime minister himself. He established an ad-hoc organization called the trade negotiations office which reported directly to the Canadian Government Cabinet and had access to the highest levels of bureaucracy. It established in no uncertain terms their negotiation goals and objectives which included a strong dispute resolution mechanism that the Canadians felt was vitally important to their success.

In contrast, the United States did not consider the FTA to be especially important and let Canada do all the initial work. The only reason why the US Congress even considered the FTA proposal was that they liked the idea of a bilateral approach to trade and were tired of the previous mechanism that failed to settle a host of trade dispute irritants between the two countries known as GATT.

Strong differences in interests and approaches dogged the negotiations.

The botanical image that so transfixed the Irish public in the autumn-winter of 1845 was that of the putrefying tuber. The sense of foreboding and despair this inspired was captured in a contemporary oil painting – ‘The discovery of the Potato Blight’ – by the Cork-born artist, Daniel McDonald (1821–53). It has graced the cover of several histories of the Irish Famine. Yet the image of the mess of potatoes was symptomatic of a deeper malaise, of a social system that accommodated runaway population increase, leaving its people vulnerable to harvest failure. George Nicholls’ hastily compiled reports on a Poor Law for Ireland in 1838 spoke of a ‘reckless disregard of the future’. Weak landlordism, which might be seen as a consequence, though not a necessary consequence of seventeenth-century colonialism, had accepted or acquiesced in the proliferation of cottier and labouring households, most notably in mountainous localities and west of the Shannon. Strong landlordism would have meant a more interventionist ruling class exercising tighter control over household formation, accompanied by periodic evictions of squatters and smallholders as market conditions changed. To take a nearby comparator, this would have meant a tenurial regime more akin to that of Scotland where landlords were vigilant in controlling access to land and housing. This had a ruthless edge, so the Scottish historical alternative had its downside, particularly in the shorter term. .

Phenomenology is a philosophical tradition that is well integrated into sociology. However, few social scientists have taken the direct route to the roots of phenomenology to either Husserl or Heidegger. They have instead been guided and accompanied by other researchers, whose works have functioned like bridges of knowledge. The work of this kind that has spawned the interest among social scientists in phenomenology is without any doubt Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s famous book The Social Construction of Reality (Berger 1970:15; Berger and Luckmann 1991). It is through their works that social scientists have come to appreciate another Austrian social scientist, namely Alfred Schutz (1899–1959). And with the help of Schutz, some have traveled the road all the way back to the father of phenomenology, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).

Though much knowledge has been generated by researchers that have taken the Berger and Luckmann–Schutz–Husserl road, it comes with some drawbacks, primarily an egological (atomistic) view on human beings. To rectify this problem, this chapter takes the reader on a tour along the second road to phenomenology, which leads us to the German philosopher, the phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The point of bringing up Husserl and Heidegger is to show that their different versions of phenomenology today are relevant to sociology and other social sciences. The discussion of Heidegger will uncover paradigmatic assumptions (Kuhn 1962) of the social sciences that are taken for granted. It is shown that Heidegger’s ontological approach is a more radical sociological starting point than the Husserlian (Cartesian) egological that has come to dominate the social sciences. To show the concrete implication, this text explains how these two approaches give different accounts of what is one of the most central notions in the social sciences, institutions.

The First Road to Phenomenology: Egological Epistemology

The first road to phenomenology is well-known. When talking to people in the social sciences who have used phenomenology, their story is often identical. After having read Berger and Luckmann, they got interested in Schutz, and they may have studied the works of Husserl, or at least have had a look at it.

Introduction

The experience of European integration provides a challenge to classical realism. The newly partnered states of Western Europe constructed a community narrative of ‘no more war’ embodied by the creation of a security community embodied in economic integration of Original Six of the Treaty of Rome – with its original six members – France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and West European military integration within NATO (Kupchan, 2010). With these steps, Western Europe turned its back on the fratricide that led to three Franco-German conflicts in less than 70 years, which resulted in two world wars (Stern, 2007).

The twentieth-century international system had Europe as its reference point: first, as the subject of empires in decline; and, subsequently, after World War II, as the object of superpower competition with a divided Germany at the front line (DePorte, 1979). During the Cold War, the debate was dominated by Waltz’s focus in the international relations literature on bipolarity, namely, the ideological and material competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Structural realism, also called neorealism, placed the emphasis squarely on the international system, the so-called third image (Waltz, 1959). In hindsight, the waning years of the last century may be perceived as a bridge decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 (Chollet and Goldgeier, 2008). That period from 11/9 to 9/11 bore witness to the rise of the internet as the driver of the latest phase in the history of globalisation, namely, the information and communications technology revolution. This latest turning point in world history featured a frequently disorienting experience of contrasts between old-world hierarchies and new social networks (Ferguson, 2019).

The early twenty-first century has experienced a series of three inflexion points. The first came right at the end of the bridge decade with the attacks on the United States in 2001. Less than a decade later, the world experienced the financial crisis of 2007–8, which left many Western countries in a state of future shock (Aliber and Kindleberger, 2015).

Man is a being of conflict. Is he also necessarily a being of war? The confrontation with the world is constitutive for the deficient human being; however, confrontation does not only mean conflict but also self-assertion in an environment that appears violent, hostile and contrary to life. Man’s confrontation with his world is not necessarily warlike, but it is also never free of any violence.

Brilliant metaphors are ready to point out the confrontation with the world. Let us think of the distinction between land and sea; man, wrote Carl Schmitt, is a being of solid ground (Schmitt, 1942). A firm standpoint is gained in space, on the earth, but the real admiration is nevertheless for the motif of taking the sea. The sea becomes the symbolic motif of reality; it is unpredictable, disorderly, shapeless and indeterminate. The dominion over the seas is, as it were, world dominion. The ocean reveals a defining facet of the human condition: if you venture too far out, you will be swallowed up by the elements; it is only on land that man wins the confrontation, when he opposes his will to the arbitrariness of the powers that be.

Another metaphor about realities in which we live is found in polar regions. The eternal ice confronts man with the experience of infinity. Under a mass of ice that stretches across the land masses like a gigantic carpet, life is, as it were, negated (Blumenberg, 1979, 1999). The human world threatens to suffocate under the rule of ice; everything that would be significant in the human world threatens to be shrouded by eternal silence.

The eternal ice threatens absolute insignificance and silence, but in the present, the ice becomes the object of a relationship of concern. In a global context, the melting of the ice becomes a metaphor of concern, both figuratively and literally. For beneath a thawed sheet of ice are the traces of a new kind of relationship of violence and world. Worry is not directed against the world, but is its own expression – henceforth, it no longer applies to the traditional reference to the world, which would simply be based on one’s own survival. Categories have to be found for this world relation of concern. A language must be formed that can break free from the old orders.

I had always known I was adopted, but it wasn’t until I turned 18 when my parents decided it was time to give me my adoption papers. Until that time, I hadn´t really been very concerned about my adoption. I am a bit darker than the average Dutchman, and I didn’t look like my parents, who were light-skinned Dutch people, but I never was discriminated against or treated differently by my family or friends. I had great parents, loyal friends, and nothing to really think about, or so I thought.

I had never given my adoption papers a thought nor had I wondered what might be contained in them. When my parents presented them to me, I flipped through them, but casually, just out of curiosity. It was a thick document, written in Greek, without an English translation. Suddenly my eye caught the word ‘leprosy’ and I sat up a little straighter. I read and reread the text, which stated that my biological mother, at the time of my adoption, was hospitalized for leprosy.

I was utterly shocked and asked my parents for explanations. Leprosy? What do you mean leprosy? How did she get this and where from? It actually still existed at that time? My mother told me that they had no more information than what was in the documents and said that my birth mother had not been present at my final “handing over,” because she was in the hospital being treated for the disease. My parents never met her nor had they seen her. I knew then and there that I wanted to go back one day to find out exactly what happened. This was also the very moment when I decided to learn Greek.

I was born in 1959 and was one-and-a-half years old when my parents adopted me in June 1961. They adopted me at the same time as my brother, Peter, who was three years old. Peter is not my biological brother and was from another family in Corfu. Ill and the second youngest in his family, his parents were unable to take care of him. After having spent some time in the care of different foster mothers, he eventually came to the Baby Center Mitera, from where he and I would both be adopted. Peter lived there for only two months.

Learning Objectives

• 1. To understand the concept of entrepreneurship

• 2. To highlight the factors responsible for the wider acceptance of entrepreneurship in the twenty-first century

• 3. To appreciate some prominent entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial contributions

• 4. Learn about entrepreneurial intention and the resulting entrepreneurial ventures

• 5. To introduce sustainability entrepreneurship that solves societal issues

Introduction

Erving Goffman has been characterized as simultaneously a rebel and reactionary (Collins 1986). He publicly presented himself as a scholar who was unconcerned with politics, ideological arguments, and pragmatist sociology. He was deeply committed to a form of micro-sociology that privileged the realm of everyday interactions and his field of inquiry, on the margins of mainstream sociology, and unconventional methodologies positioned him as an outsider in the discipline. He found amusement and pleasure in the possibilities of individual interactions to subvert social expectations and order (Marx 1984). Goffman’s choice of subjects and study—the everyday lives of the stigmatized, institutionalized, marginalized—was ripe for a pragmatist analysis. Nevertheless, he eschewed wading into the politics of the day and avoided any overtly prescriptive or moralizing stance in his writing; at first glance he presents a face of agnosticism to his subjects. Goffman’s silence on matters of social importance and structural change, in his work and in his interactions with students and colleagues, exists in tension with his empathetic descriptions of the plight of marginalized individuals. Nevertheless, a holistic reading of Goffman’s work unearths implicit values and political commitments, bearing in mind that his intellectual project was an unfinished one.

This chapter draws on themes and analyses throughout Goffman’s work to pull together the threads of political commitment therein. Colleagues and students have characterized him as largely apolitical in his everyday life, and Goffman once described his own politics as “anarchist”—a debatable claim (Gamson 1985) that perhaps spoke to the value that Goffman placed on the individual. However, despite the criticisms that have been levied, Goffman’s work and understanding of the interaction order has much to offer to contemporary sociologists concerned with a politics of identity and of the margins.

The role of politics and partisanship in sociological inquiry has long been debated in the discipline. A vocal polemicist, Alvin W. Gouldner (1962) was deeply critical of sociologists’ attempts to promote the “myth” of value-free sociology. He distinguished between “value free” sociology and sociological “objectivity,” arguing that the analyst’s political and moral commitments must be made explicit to promote reflexivity and to ensure that the terms of the analysis and the basis of judgment are transparent (Gouldner 1968).

Colorful stories were part of my daily life while growing up in New York City. Everyone living there seemed to have at least one juicy domestic yarn to share with a fellow subway rider or a neighbor on a sitting area bench. Through storytelling, bonds were forged and new friendships made. My family had plenty of their own tales to tell. Yet the stories that circulated in our household never felt like they belonged to me—I couldn’t grab them and re-tell them in my own circle of friends. My line of descent was different; my bloodline was unknown. I rejected the sagas of my adopted family and took refuge in those contained in a slim, time-worn volume—the tales of my favorite Olympians.

As a child, I remember crying for poor Demeter whose innocent daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, the somber ruler of the underworld. I marveled at the lovely Aphrodite, who was born out of the blood and foam of Ouranos’ dismembered body. And, of course, there was Athena, the namesake of that ancient and polluted modern city where I was born, that wise and cunning goddess, who challenged the young and frightened Arachne to a tempestuous weaving contest no mortal could bear. I felt a strange kinship to these mythic deities, but Pandora was my favorite— it is said that curiosity drove her to open wide that coveted box, exposing mere mortals to the dark creatures inside. Like Pandora, my own curiosity and my growing need to find my own family ‘ιστορία’ (history) eventually led me back to Εƛƛάς (Hellas), land of light and immortality.

April 1962

Today was the day—the day she would say goodbye to something that had been sheltered deep inside her swollen body for the past nine months, something that squirmed around constantly looking for a place to be, and then came into the world “μϵ τα πόδια”—feet first.

She was denied the opportunity of seeing or holding her tiny boarder. The doctors took the baby while she was still “asleep”—asleep in that trance state so common to mothers giving birth during that time.

Peter L. Berger (1928–2017) was a towering intellectual figure in the field of sociology and public intellectual life from the second half of the twentieth century into the first two decades of the twenty-first century. His Invitation to Sociology introduces generations of students to the field. And, what better introduction could students have to the discipline. Berger was just simply fascinated by human beings in all their various endeavors, and ways of living. In his autobiographical reflections, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (2011), he explains how he was merely interested in finding out about American life and the course he enrolled in at the New School taught sociology through the novels of Honore de Balzac. These novels of Balzac captured the comedic drama of life in Paris, and in so doing provided a window into the everyday world of ordinary individuals. Berger was hooked. Sociology became his disciplinary home, but that was just a bureaucratic designation. He was a social scientist, an observer of humanity, and a critical analyst of social relations and their impact on practice and performance in religious life, in commercial life, and in social life in general.

The subtitle of Berger’s fascinating memoir is: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore. For anyone who has read Peter L. Berger, listened to him give a lecture, or had the opportunity to visit and converse with him, the one obvious fact is that he was never boring and certainly never a bore. He was simply one of the more fascinating people you ever encountered in this academic life. Charming and self-effacing, Berger was a great storyteller and loved to use jokes to illustrate profound points. He did not rely on academic jargon to make his points, but instead wrote intelligently in plain language—this is as true for The Social Construction of Reality as for Invitation to Sociology (1966). He simply invited his readers to join him in an intellectual journey to understand mankind in all walks of life and in all his endeavors—even those that most of us would like to keep behind closed doors and hidden from public examination. He was simply curious about the way we live, work, play, love, pray, etc.