加納 榮吉郎

"Not everyone is ready to negotiate." This simple phrase inspired me to start a series of studies on negotiations in social hierarchies.

Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams in their Everyday Negotiation mentioned; "How do people who lack bargaining power because of their position in an organization, their professions, their age, their gender, their race, their class, or their ethnicity make negotiations happen?"   (2003: 7-11)

My attempts are to enlarge the application of their theory about "hidden agendas" into the wide range of our cross-national societies where hierarchical principles are dominant and to leave as many charts of dynamics as possible for next generations to navigate social hierarchies, just as Pacific islanders passed their knowledge of ocean swells and their refractions by "stick charts" from father to son.

Negotiation studies are sometimes heuristic or retroductive, neither sophisticated nor necessarily optimum in each social problem, but universal as a way of empirical philosophy, just as Arctic people use their knives for working with wood, hides, skins, fish and meat or for combat.