Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Cultural Differences in Approaches to Arbitration Professor Peter B. Smith University of Sussex, UK Cross-cultural psychologists have most typically mapped variations between cultural groups around the world in terms of relative endorsement of values and of beliefs. A key dimension of variance has proved to be between cultural groups that are characterised by individualism and low degrees of hierarchy and those that are characterised by collectivism and greater degrees of hierarchy. Nations can be arrayed along a spectrum reflecting relative degrees of endorsement of these attributes, which correlate also with nation-level wealth. This contrast implies distinctive attitudes toward the nature of justice and how it may be accomplished. Distinctions have been proposed between distributive justice (what is fair), procedural justice (how allocations are made) and interactional justice (the behaviours of resource allocators). Persons within individualistic cultures tend to endorse universalistic concepts of fair outcomes and of what are fair procedures. However, persons from more collectivistic cultures tend toward a sharper, more particularistic perspective. What is fair and just among members of one's in-group may be judged according to different criteria than what is fair and just in relation to out-groups. Within work groups, the equity of pay allocations is a major source of concern in individualistic cultures, because pay is indicative of the status and esteem of each individual. Equity is a lesser concern in collectivistic cultures, because the group membership of individuals is assured by continuity of membership. However, when inequitable allocations are made, members of collectivistic groups react more strongly than do those in individualistic cultures. Thus resource allocations elicit different types of motives across cultures. Contrasting motives have also been identified in studies of negotiation. Researchers from individualistic cultures have typically postulated that negotiator behaviour depends on the level of concern for one's own group outcome and for the other party's outcome, but this perspective has weaknesses when used in non-Western contexts. Leung (1987) is a researcher from a collectivistic culture who has postulated an alternative model. He proposes that motives for reduction of animosity and for avoidance of group disintegration will be predictive of outcome. The relative salience of these two motives will depend on the nature of the other party. Animosity reduction is more relevant to negotiations with out-groups, while disintegration avoidance is more relevant to in-group issues. Each of these research literatures has relevance to ways in which the use of arbitration will be perceived. A first question has to do with the preference for the use of arbitration in relation to other modes of conflict resolution. A second question has to with the reasons for whichever preferences are found. A final question concerns the extent to which arbitration is found satisfactory when it has been employed. In Leung's initial (1987) study, he found that US respondents favoured arbitration whereas Hong Kong respondents had a stronger preference for bargaining and mediation. However, when he compared the ratings as to why these different preferences occurred, he found that in both nations the preferred procedure was that which was perceived as giving disputants greater control over the process and being most likely to reduce animosity. Gire and Carment (1993) presented students in Canada and Nigeria with the same scenarios, one of which described an interpersonal conflict and the other of which described an intergroup conflict. Canadians rated negotiation more highly than the Nigerians, and Nigerians evaluated the use of threats more positively than the Canadians. There was no difference in their relative preference for the use of arbitration. Canadians perceived negotiation as most fair, whereas Nigerians perceived arbitration and accepting the situation as most likely to reduce animosity, and more likely to give control of the process. Bond, Leung and Schwartz (1992) studied groups of students in Hong Kong and Israel who must agree the course grades for fellow group members. Israelis had a stronger preference to use threats and to use arbitration.. Finally, in further studies also using the same scenarios, Leung et al. (1990, 1992) found that Japanese students had a stronger preference for the use of arbitration than those in Spain, the Netherlands or Canada. In none of these samples was arbitration the most strongly preferred mode of handling the featured conflicts. However, in all of them the preferred procedures were those that were rated as giving greater control over the process and greater prospect for animosity reduction. These studies have value, but their real world implications are reduced by the fact that they all used students as respondents, and mostly asked respondents to react to imaginary scenarios. A more recent study has asked US and Chinese arbitrators to make judgments about scenarios describing breaches of commercial contracts. Friedman et al. (2007) drew on the literature of individualism and collectivism to predict that US arbitrators will hold individuals accountable for contract breach, whereas Chinese arbitrators will hold groups accountable. In the commercial field it is ordinarily organizations rather than individuals who breach contracts. Consequently, they predicted and found that Chinese arbitrators would hold the offending party more accountable and would therefore award larger damages against them. The available studies span an insufficiently broad range of samples to permit clear conclusions as to which types of nation are particularly favourable toward arbitration or averse to it. However they do provide a clear basis for specifying the cultural values that underlie the variety of procedural preferences that has been examined, and these values may also be predictive of reactions to judgments made by arbitrators.