How Personal, Organizational, and Cultural Values Affect Decision Making

How Personal, Organizational, and Cultural Values Affect Decision Making

Self-limiting Conflict: The Gandhian Style

I have mentioned two basic categories of conflict regulation scholarship. In the preceding section we concerned ourselves with the first, specialists engaged in third-party intervention research and experimentation-intermediaries, negotiation, conciliation, communication control and modification. The second involves the study of ways of waging conflict that tend both to keep it within bounds and to limit its intensity or at least the possibility of violence-nonviolent social movements, nonviolent resistance on the part of individuals and groups, nonviolent alternative national defense strategies. Let us look at conflict processes that are self-regulating in nature, i.e., that have built-in devices to keep the conflict within acceptable bounds and to inhibit violent extremism and unbridled escalation.

Socialization is an important determinant of the style and effectiveness of conflict regulation in any society. If Tolley (1973) is correct in placing the formative period for attitudinal and behavioral patterns concerning peace/war issues and conflict regulation styles at ages 4-12, then learning creative approaches to conflict regulation through family, school, mass media, and other primary learning environments is essential. There are a few sources dealing with this problem (Nesbitt, 1973; Abrams and Schmidt, 1972).

There are societies and groups within societies that socialize their members in effective conflict regulation. Bourdieu (1962) describes Berber Kabyles of North Africa as a society held together by a process of balanced and strictly controlled conflict

Self-Limiting Conflict in which members are socialized to avoid violence: Elise Boulding (1974) observes that there are certain types of family environments and child-rearing practices that tend to produce persons with nonviolent proclivities and creative response patterns to conflict. Ultimately the socialization process, political socialization in particular, is probably the most important conflict regulation device. We should soon learn some interesting things about the impact of a decade of involvement in an unpopular war on the attitudinal and behavioral patterns of America's youth.

Etzioni's self-encapsulation concept is very useful here. It is a process in which certain conflicts are increasingly limited by their own nature and by the nature of the host system, so that the "range of expression of the conflict is curbed." Certain modes of conflict and weapons are excluded by mutual, sometimes tacit, consent, and the conflict becomes ritualized-the game is played by the rules, so to speak. Dahrendorf's analysis of the institutionalization of labor/management conflict over the past half century is an excellent illustration of self encapsulation.