Managing Interpersonal Conflict or Out of Work

Managing Interpersonal Conflict, Vol. 4

Author: William A Donohu

Managing Interpersonal Conflict helps readers better understand and ultimately manage their routine interpersonal conflicts. Specifically, the book walks readers through the conflict process--from the initial decision of whether or not to confront differences to how to plan the actual confrontation. Donohue deals extensively with the negotiation process and, if negotiation proves unsuccessful, with third-party dispute resolution. The book emphasizes keeping conflicts under control and keeping focused on the issues. The key to managing conflict is to address differences collaboratively so parties can create better solutions and, ultimately, strengthen their relationships. Managing Interpersonal Conflict prepares and encourages the reader to stop avoiding their conflicts and start confronting them. Designed for college and university undergraduates, Donohue's text and the Interpersonal Commtext series will also interest students and professionals in management studies, sociology, organization studies, and social psychology. "They provide a very useful look at a somewhat broader than usual range of conflict issues. . . . Where the decision is to confront, it offers useful approaches to allowing face saving and to issue structuring that will allow the conflict, in many cases, to be readily resolved. . . . The second section . . . provides a useful and easily worked with framework for negotiating, and deals most effectively with the use of and responses to the exercise of power in the negotiation context. . . . The book is exceptionally readable and effective in its presentation of approaches to conflict. While it is not a traditional academic text, periodic references to the conflictliterature are used to allow the reader to examine the issues presented in more depth. The book will serve as an outstanding text for a training program in conflict management and can also be used by an individual effectively to learn these techniques." --The Alternative Newsletter

Table of Contents:

Understanding Conflict
Confronting Conflict
Face Saving
Structuring the Issues
Effective Negotiation
Negotiating in the Face of Power
at Kind of Conflict Help
is
Available
Conflict Management Flowchart

New interesting book: Europes Last Summer or The Price of Loyalty

Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts

Author: Alexander Keyssar

Out of Work, the first book to chronicle the history of unemployment in the United States traces the evolution of the problem of joblessness from the early decades of the nineteenth century to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Challenging the widely held notion that the United States was a labour-scarce society in which jobs were plentiful, it argues that unemployment played a major role in American history long before the crash of the stock market in
1929. Focusing on the state of Massachusetts, Professor Kevssar analyses the economic and social changes that gave birth to the modern concept of unemployment. Drawing on previously untapped sources - including richly detailed statistics and vivid verbatim testimony - he demonstrates that joblessness was a pervasive feature of working-class life from the 1870s to the 1920s. The book describes the ingenious, yet personally costly, strategies that unemployed workers devised to cope with the joblessness in the absence of formal governmental assistance. It also explores the many dimensions of working-class life that were profoundly affected by recurrent lay-offs and the chronic uncertainty of work. Finally, it demonstrates that the fundamental contours of the Massachusetts experience were repeated, sooner or later, throughout the United States.