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Transactional Man: Teaching Negotiation Strategy in the Age of Trump
Author(s) -
Richard Shell G.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
negotiation journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.238
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1571-9979
pISSN - 0748-4526
DOI - 10.1111/nejo.12282
Subject(s) - negotiation , transactional leadership , citation , computer science , sociology , psychology , world wide web , social psychology , social science
The election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States has left many people in a state of head-spinning disorientation. With him, as with Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty, a word means “just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” And when we ask, as Alice does in Through the Looking Glass, “whether you can make words mean so many different things,” Trump confidently replies, as does Humpty Dumpty: “The question is: which is to be the master – that’s all” (Carroll 1871: 112). For now, Trump is the master. From the halls of academia to the shores of North Korea, professors, foreign leaders, policy analysts, and media pundits are parsing his every tweet, trying to determine when to take him “literally” and when to take him, as his supporters usually do, “seriously.” Nowhere are the implications of this new style of presidential leadership more fraught than in negotiations. Words matter in bargaining. Guessing what they mean when deployed as part of an aggressive,