Negotiating Across Worldviews

HDS 2081 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Leaders, advocates, and other change agents must engage effectively with people whose worldviews are very different than their own. Conflicts involving deeply held beliefs and values present special challenges and may require adjustments to approaches to negotiation we use in other situations. Through interdisciplinary readings, presentations, negotiation simulations, dialogue experiences, exercises, discussion, and reflective practices, this practice-focused, workshop style course aims to help participants become more aware of how their own and others’ worldviews influence conflicts involving identity-defining differences in perspective and to help them become more effective negotiators.

Worldview conflict can arise in what we think of as private contexts (e.g., business transactions) or public contexts (e.g., domestic healthcare policy negotiations, bilateral trade disputes, and wars) and at a local level (e.g., land use disputes), societal level (e.g., the abortion debate), or global level (e.g., climate change policy). We will consider the potential and challenges of negotiation in diverse contexts at all levels, taking up topics such as the comparative advantages and disadvantages, and interplay among, litigation, civil resistance, and negotiation as tools for social change; a bounded theory of pluralistic relativism as a response to the reality of moral diversity; and how social norms function and evolve.

The course is limited to 48 students. There are no prerequisites for this course. If you have taken another negotiation course at Harvard, you will find that this one builds upon and extends what you learned. This course has no final examination. Each student will be assigned to a Section that will meet for an additional hour each week at a time to be determined.