Abstract
This chapter develops the argument that the potential of mediation should not be limited to a method for negotiating the instrumental settlement of conflicts viewed as isolated personal events. It makes a case for a mediation practice that opens up the parties’ understandings of conflict to the ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ of the everyday. Mouffe describes politics as theThe political she defines as ‘the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations’ (p. 15). Unless mediation practice is knowingly aware of the political it will be unable to create space for the emergence of more just and democratic outcomes, and its attractiveness to employees will ultimately become tarnished. If mediators’ interventions are informed by a sense of the political, there is scope for enemies to be transformed into adversaries whose opinions can be heard, and sometimes, through dialogue, adversaries may be able to alter their worldviews and discover new identities together.
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Notes
- 1.
Zizek (2006) radically develops this thought, suggesting that ‘it is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply a small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic immanent impossibility’ (p. 252). This might explain the depth of anger that is aroused when attachment to ‘identity’ is disturbed, as it yields a glimpse of an underlying existential ‘lack.’
- 2.
REDRESS stands for Resolve Employment Disputes, Reach Equitable Solutions Swiftly and is the United States Postal Service’s employment mediation program.
- 3.
This observation glosses over arguments about the commodification of labour and the extraction of surplus value. See Harvey (2015), Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism, (London: Profile Books).
- 4.
Anecdotally there is a belief, arising out of community mediation, that even when an imbalance is obviously apparent, the mediator should not in any case interfere. To do so risks undermining impartiality. Bush and Folger (2005) do not endorse use of the mediation process to rebalance power in an asymmetrical relationship, whereas Moore (2003) most emphatically does. Of course in practice a mediator cannot affect contextual structures of power that exist around a given conflict situation, although a practicing workplace mediator once explained how she would take the powerful party (the boss) to one side and challenge them to behave better in order to open a possibility of finding a resolution. If there is a disparity in the parties’ abilities to express themselves, the mediator can choose to assist one party to better articulate their interests without compromising their impartiality.
- 5.
Whilst Buber (2002) speaks of dialogue in terms of a mutual connection that is unreserved and open-hearted, his essentialist view does not seem to encompass selflessness so much as a stripping of the self of artifice.
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Seaman, R. (2016). Political Awareness and Dialogue. In: Explorative Mediation at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51674-9_4
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