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Live from the University of Texas at Austin
The Liberal Arts Development Studio,
and the College of Liberal Arts, present:
Introduction to Human Dimensions of Organizations.
And now, here is your professor, Doctor Art Markman.
Hey, everybody, it is Monday, it's our first Monday together,
and we have folks in the studio again, say "hello," everybody.
Students off camera: Hello!
Alright, hope you could hear that at home.
Yeah, so I'm excited to be here,
and hope that the Longhorn loss on Saturday didn't drag the weekend
down for too many people.
But, what we're going to do today is we're gonna shift disciplines a little bit.
So, if you think about where we were last class,
we were talking about sociology and anthropology,
we were talking about the kinds of relationships that people engage in,
we talked a little bit about the content there, the four types of relationships,
we talked about methodology, how in the world would you study this,
and then we talked about practice,
that is, what is the influence of these kinds of relationships
on the way that people negotiate with each other.
So we went through that in the field of a social science,
and now we're gonna shift and
we're going to move to one of the humanities.
In particular, we're going to talk about history.
And, in fact, history is going to make up several of the next lectures.
So today, we're going to talk about some ancient history,
going back to ancient Greece.
Then next class, we're going to shift to something more modern,
go to the 1970's, where we're going to talk a little bit about Nixon,
and his ability to open up a relationship with China,
and then, the following week, actually on the following Wednesday,
we're going to have a special guest in class. An actual, live historian,
who's going to talk a little bit about what it means
to do research in history.
And so, the focus today and on Wednesday is going to be
on the content and practice associated with these episodes from history.
And then, we'll have one special class where we'll talk about methodology
in history.
So that's kind of where things are going to be going.
We're going to focus today a little bit on the concept of power,
and how that relates to negotiation.
And we're going to start by thinking about the concept of power
by actually looking at a negotiation back from Ancient Greece.
So we're going to talk about what happens when you can dictate the terms,
because you are negotiating from a position of extreme strength and power.
We'll focus on the Melian Dialogue,
which was written as part of the history of the Peloponnesian War
by, it was written by Thucydides.
And then we'll actually ask the question:
So, should the powerful folks always win?
Should they always get what they want?
And what does that mean?
And that'll actually touch on some of the ethical issues associated
with using your power.
And along the way, I'm going to have to show you a map.
So, there's a cool map utility we've got here,
so you're going to get to see me fumble with technology
in yet a new way this class.
So, to get started, I want you all to think for a moment -- in fact,
I'm going to give you ten or fifteen seconds to write this down
for yourself --
I want you to ask yourself: What is power?
So take a moment, and just write this down.
If you hear about the concept of power, what exactly does that mean?
(pause)
This, by the way, is not your quiz,
that'll come later, this is just something to write down.
And after you've thought a little bit about the concept of power,
I want you to also think a little bit about negotation.
So remember, we talked about this idea of negotiation being:
we've got conflicting goals, we've got two parties or sometimes more parties,
but let's just think about two different parties working together,
they have conflicting goals, they are negotiating in order
to try to figure out who's going to get what they want in the course
of achieving those goals.
So now I want you to think for a second, having written down your
definition of power,
I want you to write down: what does power allow you to do when you're negotiating?
(pause)
Take a couple of seconds to do that.
(pause)
You can even chat with each other about this on the chat facility, if you want.
But the reason I want you to do this is because whenever we're teaching
anything, one of the things that we're trying to do is to have you
actually make your own bets on things,
that is, to really think about: "Well, what do I know already?"
The issue isn't to be right or to wrong.
It's that we want to influence the way that you're thinking about things
and so the best way to do that is, for us to pull that up from your memory
so that it's a concept that active and ready for you to play with.
And then we can manipulate that concept a little bit.
So when I ask these kinds of questions,
it's really just to get you thinking about these kinds of concepts.
So, if we think about the notion of what is power,
let's actually dive into this by asking: "Well, what can you do with power?"
So, power could be physical strength, but it need not be physical strength,
power can also be, can also involve, having control over resources,
because a lot of what power is all about is the ability to control an outcome.
So, if you think about life, anytime you engage in an action,
there is the influence of the circumstance of what's going on,
and then there's the influence over what you bring to the table:
your physical attributes, your mental attributes, your resources.
And so, think about it like this.
To the degree that you can control what's going to happen next,
rather than the circumstances controlling what's going to happen next,
you have a degree of power.
And, to the extent that the circumstance is controlling what's going on,
then the circumstance has the power,
and you really don't.
And so, the circumstance could be the physical situation, right,
if you're caught in a tidal wave, then it's a physical circumstance
that has overpowered you.
But, you might also be in a social environment,
in which someone else has physical strength, or resources, or something else.
And that gives them the power.
So, to the extent that the situation is governing what's going on,
you are relatively powerless.
And, to the extent that you can actually influence what's going to happen,
you have some degree of power.
And, the factors that create that power depend on the nature of the circumstance.
If you're playing defensive line for the Longhorns,
then it is physical strength that guides power,
and a little bit of mental understanding of what's going on in the game.
If you are negotiating with someone over a business deal,
then your physical strength may not matter so much,
but your economic strength might matter.
And, of course, as you read in the Melian Dialogue,
we had Athens who was a military power,
so they had a tremendous amount of military strength that they were
bringing to bear, that enabled them to influence outcomes.
And so, when you have a degree of power,
one of the things that that enables you to do in a negotiation
is to begin to control that outcome.
Now, in some negotiations, one side has most or all of the power,
in which case, they have an opportunity to really dictate
everything that's going to go on.
In many negotiations, of course, each party has some source of power,
that they will bring to bear on the negotiation.
So, for example, if you think about labor negotiations for a second.
You have the employer, who has a certain amount of power,
because they get to decide how much they'd like to pay people,
what resources they're going to bring to that employment situation.
But if you have a labor negotiation, let's say with a union,
or some kind of collective bargaining,
then the employees also have some potential power,
because they might choose not to come to work, or to slow things down at work.
And so, each side is exerting it's power
in order to try to come to some accommodation,
because presumably the employer wants to pay as little as possible,
in order to get the work they want out of people.
While the employees would like to make as much as they can.
And, of course, that's a bit of an over-simplification of
the way that labor negotiations work,
but you have a conflict of interest,
and different sides have different amounts of power.
And, in fact, if you think about trying to development a certain amount of power
in a negotiation context
-- one of the reasons that unions developed in the first place --
is because when people negotiated as individuals against a big company
it's often very difficult for the individual to have any power at all,
because if that person chooses not to come to work,
there might be plenty of other people who are willing to come in.
And it is that collection of individuals that provides more power
to the folks on the employment side,
and that gives them a little bit more opportunity to try to control the outcome.
So again, this concept of power is that:
whatever the circumstance is, it is the ability to have some amount of
control over the situation,
rather than having the situation and the people in it having some degree
of control over you.
So that's really where we're going with this.
And, by the way, as we get into the Melian Dialogue,
what I want you to be thinking about is -- a lot of times we're going to
use terms, and I'm going to seemingly belabor the point here,
where I'm going to, you know, dig into what some of these terms mean --
and part of the reason for doing that is because a lot of times
we throw words around without necessarily really thinking deeply
about what influence they have.
The more that you understand where these terms come from,
and what they mean,
the better able you're going to be to manipulate those when
you're in a situation in which you have to influence what's happening.
Alright lets dive into the Melian Dialogue
So, the Melian Dialogue involves the island of Melos,
and the Melian Dialogue happened on the island of Melos between
Athens and the Melians.
And this was an invent that was laid out by Thucydides.
And Thucydides was an ancient Greek historian,
so he was born about 460 BCE
-- and remember the years as we get up to the start of the common era
will count downward until we get to zero,
and then we'll move up to the common era dates that,
we're in 2019 now, as I'm taping this --
So, he was born about 460, and of course oddly enough
people didn't really have good birth certificates back then,
so we just know he was born in that vicinity.
And he died sometime after 404.
He was the son of a wealthy Athenian,
and, of course, if you go back to ancient Greece or ancient Rome,
a lot of what we know about that era tends to be stuff that comes from
people who had some degree of wealth.
Unfortunately, we don't learn a lot about the people who are
sort of the common folks,
because they didn't necessarily have access to the ability
to write a history of things.
A lot of what we learn about the daily life of the more common folks
during these eras comes from archaeological digs,
in which we're able to look at housing and what people ate,
and things like that.
There isn't as much of a written record.
So we tend to get records from wealthy folks and people who
played significant roles during that period of history.
So, what we have is Thucydides who wrote a history of
the Peloponnesian War.
He was a general during the war, so played a pretty prominent role,
got that generalship in part because
he was already part of the wealthy class in Athens.
And after the war was over, he wrote a history of the war that
provides a tremendous amount about what we know now about
the Peloponnesian War.
And so, what in the world is the Peloponnesian War?
Well, it is a conflict between two nation-states:
Athens and Sparta.
And they differed in a variety of ways, and in particular,
they differed sort of politically and in their overall orientation
towards thinking about life.
So Sparta was a monarchy, so they had a king.
They were fairly conservative,
meaning that they were resistant to cultural change.
They really wanted to keep things relatively the same as they had been
for many years.
And so, they represented one pole of society in the area around Greece.
And then there was Athens.
And Athens was a second nation-state.
This was a democracy, so there was actually more power given to the people.
And, Athens was a much more innovative society.
They really were interested in innovation in a variety of ways:
innovation politically, innovation in terms of invention and technology,
and so it was a much more open and free-flowing society.
And, you know, often we see conflicts that occur between groups that are
relatively more open, and groups that are relatively more traditional
because that creates a significant conflict of interest.
And, at some point, when a conflict of interest breaks down,
and so you try to negotiate,
whenever you have, you know, a conflict between nation-states,
one of the things that happens is you often start by trying to negotiate,
and when negotiations break down,
you need some other mode of resolving a conflict.
And, of course, in the second-third and the middle-third of this class,
we're going to talk a lot about different modes of conflict resolution.
But one of them we're probably not going to spend a ton of time on,
is open warfare.
And that's something that happens between nations
where you can't resolve the conflict,
so what do you end up doing?
You end up going to war and bringing your military strength to bear on this.
So the conflict between Sparta and Athens boils over and turns into a war,
the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BCE,
and the first phase of the war lasts for ten years.
And I want you to think for a moment about this.
You know, when you think about wars in the modern era,
many of the wars that we hear about are really not that long, right?
You know, World War One, the US is involved in this for three years.
World War Two, the United States is involved, you know, for five years.
And these are relatively short, and these feel like long wars to us,
and yet they really were much shorter than something
like the Peloponnesian war,
in part, of course, because you don't have airplanes
that can get around the world in a day.
And so, when someone's going to go to war,
they're going to have to sail to get there.
And, so, I'll show you a map in a few moments of the area,
but in order to get from one place to another,
you're hopping on a boat.
So everything takes a fair amount of time,
and there's a lot of seige warfare,
where you surround a place for a while, try to starve people out.
So, warfare takes place over a long period of time.
The Peloponnesian War no exception to that.
So, the first phase of the war about ten years long.
And it's really Athens is the one who's leading here,
they're the ones who are having the primary success.
And then, then there was 'half-time', there was a seven-year truce
where they tried to work things out via negotiation,
and so, and towards the end of that seven-year truce is when
we're going to pick up the story with the conquest of Melos,
which happened in 416 BCE.
And you'll notice that this is really towards the end of 'half-time',
and then the war becomes a kind of hot war again,
an open war, starting in let's see, it's 414.
And it lasts another ten years,
and the second phase of the war favors Sparta.
And this is going to become important,
so what I want you to remember here is:
first half of the war, Athens is largely the one who's the victor,
then there's the truce,
then in the second phase we're going to see that Sparta ends up
having a better time of it in the second half of the war.
So, hold onto that,
because that's going to become important as we understand
the implications of the Melian Dialogue.
Alright, so before we go to the map here,
I just want to tell you a little bit about the siege of Melos.
So, the Siege of Melos, 416 BCE,
it's the tail-end of this half-time period,
what was called the Peace of Nicias.
Athens wants Melos.
So, so just because Athens and Sparta aren't directly in conflict
doesn't mean that they're not strategically trying to do things.
So, you know, as we look at the map --
actually, why don't we go to the map here, can we do this? Let's see --
Hopefully this'll work. If we go to our map -- there we go!
We got Athens up here, so, this blue area here is the Mediterranean Sea.
So, if you think of your world map for a second,
the Mediterranean, you've got southern Europe and northern Africa,
you've got a fairly large body of water,
hopefully you've had a chance to look at that, maybe even visited
some of these places.
If we look at the map here, Athens is in the southern part of Greece,
which is just a little bit east of where
-- so Greece, of course, a little bit east of where Italy is today,
where modern Italy is --
Greece was one of the real world centers at this point.
We've got Athens, and then Melos is actually way down here.
So, if you've actually been to Athens or been to this area of the world,
you know there's a lot of islands around there and,
these days, kind of a a great place to spend a vacation, but
basically and Sparta, which is not really on the map, is sort of up here,
a little bit east of Athens.
And so basically, Athens wants to control the seas.
And the way that Athens is going to control the seas,
is by having outposts on the variety of islands
that are associated with this area.
And so, they want to really conquer the area, or at least,
have control over it.
So, I'm drawing here.
So they're going to go down to Melos and really try to see what they can do.
So what they did was, they packed up a force of about three-thousand soldiers,
a pretty significant number of people, particularly when you realize
that you're going to have to bring them on boats from
Athens all the way down to Melos.
And their aim was to bring a show of force.
So they were showing their military power.
You know, Melos is a small place, you can see it's kind of a
tiny island, not going to have three-thousand soldiers.
And so, Athens is bringing a superior military force,
and the aim is to negotiate with the Melians,
and that's where we pick up the Melian Dialogue.
So that's kind of setting the stage for where we are.
Alright, so what's going to happen?
Okay, the Melian Dialogue.
The Athenians come, and they want to present a case
to the entire population of Melos, that's their strategy.
And the idea here is several-fold.
The first, of course, is that, as I mentioned, Athens is a democracy.
And so, beacuse they're a democracy,
because they believe that people have the opportunity
to control their destiny,
they want to actually give a presentation to all the people
in the hope that the people will vote.
Now, of course, there's two reasons for them to want to do this.
One: Is that it's philosophically
related to what it is that they're trying to accomplish.
But also, honestly, if you're an individual, and you see
a whole bunch of boats out to sea that you know are filled
with soldiers, and you're an individual.
Are you really, as you look at this, thinking to yourself:
"Yeah, our best strategy is going to be to stand up to you."
As individuals, you're going to feel quite a bit of fear, I think,
in that moment.
And so, I think that one of the other reasons that the Athenians
wanted to present the case to everyone,
was basically to try and scare the general population,
with the hope that these individuals would decide that
they wanted to just give in to whatever the Athenians wanted.
Now, the Melians, they had a different idea.
What they wanted was this negotiation to be done by a small number of leaders.
So they wanted the leadership of Melos
to sit down with the leadership of the Athenian delegation,
and for them to hash it out.
And there are again two reasons for this.
One: Because from a leadership standpoint,
Melos is an independent group. They are an independent island.
They are not aligned either with Athens or Sparta,
and their government structure involved a fairly small number
of people who governed.
And so, they wanted their government structure,
the people who had the political power in Melos,
to be the ones who actually engaged in that negotiation.
And they wanted to do that with the people from Athens
who were authorized to make a decision.
And part of that, of course, is just that they wanted a negotiation
that fit with the way that they governed their own island.
But the other thing is, the Melians were aware of the fact
that the common person on the island of Melos
looking out over the sea, and seeing this superior military force,
they were aware of the influence that that was going to have on everyone.
And so, they wanted to really have a smaller number of people
involved in this negotiation who would be willing to create a force
that might stand up to the Athenians.
So, you know, if there's some possibility that you're going to
end up in a heated battle with a superior force,
it's going to be very hard to get people to want to do that
if everyone is involved in that decision,
because many of the people who
are going to make that decision
are not really going to be the ones who have to go to war.
And many of the ones who see themselves as having to go to war
against this superior force
are the ones who might actually not want to vote for that.
And so, you know, there's a reason why the Melians might actually want
to bring just their leadership to that situation.
So, ultimately the Melians get what they want on this.
They actually have the opportunity for a small number of Melians
to negotiate with the Athenian leadership.
Now, when they get into this negotiation,
and, if you've read this,
you're getting an overview of that way that this negotiation went,
what you mind is that Athens is primarily focused on their power.
After all, they've amassed three-thousand soldiers on boats
to come and sit off the coast of Melos.
And so they, on purpose, have brought
a display of force that should be overwhelming to the Melians,
and their view is that should open and close the negotiation.
And so, they come in and basically say:
"Look, we want to take you over. So come, let us take over
the island of Melos, install our own government here, and
you can be now part of the nation-state of Athens."
And they really aren't particularly interested in negotiating
in any other way, because they know that when push comes to shove,
they can come and take over the island,
if they want to, militarily, and impose their own government.
And so they'd rather just have the Melians willingly invite them onto the island.