Our first major project, begun in the Spring of 1988, was to determine what effects the introduction of cooperative learning and training in constructive conflict resolution would have upon students undergoing the difficult circumstances typically found in attending an alternative high school in New York City. The results of the study showed that as students improved in managing their conflicts, they experienced increased social support and less victimization from others. This improvement in relations with others led to an increase in self-esteem, a decrease in feelings of anxiety and depression and more frequent positive feelings of well-being. Higher self-esteem, in turn, produced a greater sense of personal control over their own fates. These changes were positively associated with higher academic performances.
The Peaceful Kids ECSEL Program
In 1998, the ICCCR received a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop, test, and disseminate the Peaceful Kids ECSEL Program. This program trained day care/Head Start staff, parents and children in the social-emotional skills underlying constructive conflict resolution.
Implicit Power Theories and Power-sharing
This research concerned the resistance of the powerful to share their power (wealth, information, access, authority, etc.) in the face of the need for social change. Our first study investigated the effects of people’s implicit theories of power in organizations (unarticulated beliefs about the nature of organizational power) on their willingness to share power with subordinates (Coleman, 2004). In this study, we found that managers have two different implicit theories of power (IPTs): 1) the belief that organizational power is a scarce resource and as such should be horded and accumulated, and 2) the belief that organizational power is an expandable resource and that sharing power with others is not a loss, but rather can result in an increased ability to achieve one’s goals. The two competing views of power were shown to affect manager’s decisions whether to share or withhold resources, as well as the degree to which they involved employees in decisions about work processes. Subsequent research found additional support for the model. In a study conducted in China (Tjosvold, Coleman, & Sun, 2003), participants portraying managers in an organizational simulation were found to share more power (information and assistance) with subordinates when they were led to believe that their organization had a history of approaching organizational power as an expandable resource than when it was portrayed as traditionally viewing and approaching power as a scarce resource. More recently, two studies found that differences in the accessibility of IPTs (their salience) predicted competitive vs. cooperative orientations between managers and employees and affected managers’ willingness to share information, time, and attention (Coleman, under review).
Organizational Power Practices
In another project informed by critical management studies, we conceptualized and investigated organizational power practices – informal, tacit, and taken-for-granted organizational practices (such as gatekeeping, selective information sharing, bartering, etc.) that allow certain organizational members access to material and social resources in organizations, while denying others (Coleman & Voronov, 2003; Voronov & Coleman, 2003). Our aim was to identify how discrepancies between “official” doctrines and policies regarding participatory authority and inclusion and “actual” organizational practices that are exclusive emerge and are maintained. For instance, most corporations operate under “official” Equal Opportunity regulations and guidelines regarding fair hiring practices and fair treatment of minorities. Yet today, White males actually hold 95 percent of all top corporate jobs in the – vice president and above. Our work in this area was an attempt to identify some of the covert forces at work in sustaining such inequities, and resulted in the development of an applied framework for intervention with groups and organizations (Coleman & Voronov, 2003). The framework can help groups identify and explore those normative practices that operate in ways that are automatic and virtually imperceptible. These mundane practices, such as rules of politeness and the way work is routinely done, appear neutral and natural but in fact systematically reproduce hierarchies based on gender, race, sexual orientation, and so forth.
Project on Meta-Framing in Complex Conflicts
The aim of this project, which began in 2000, was to develop a comprehensive meta-framework for conceptualizing the multitude of conditions and processes that contribute to the self-sustaining dynamics of protracted conflicts. It builds on four basic premises regarding contemporary conflict: 1) our world is becoming increasingly more complex, ecologically, politically, economically, and socially; 2) human systems are ever-changing and the pace of change is rising; 3) such complexity and dynamism place extraordinary demands on our capacities to accurately comprehend enduring conflicts; and 4) this often leads to an over-reliance on our primary frames of understanding which are useful but limited and can over-simplify our sense of problems. As a result, much of the research on conflict intractability is either fine-grained and piecemeal; focusing on independent cause and effect relationships at single levels of analysis (e.g. studying individuals without consideration of the society in which the conflict is occurring), or case studies of specific situations viewed through a particular disciplinary lens. Similarly, our interventions, often based on the findings of such research, have limited effects or worse, unintended negative consequences which fuel the conflicts.
The metaframework offers an alternative approach. Its primary objective is to cultivate a dynamic sense of conflicts which correspond as much as possible to the complex environments in which they exist, while remaining sufficiently comprehensible and navigable. Using a conceptual platform derived from dynamical systems theory, it portrays intractable conflicts broadly as complex, non-linear systems sustained in a state of destructiveness by a variety of emergent, embedded, and automatic processes. Although the meta-framework applies the systems frame as a starting point, it ultimately emphasizes the need to employ multiple paradigms and methods for diagnosing conflict in order to best comprehend the many sources and dynamics of intractability in any given setting. Thus, in order to more fully comprehend ongoing patterns of school violence, we must understand the political, economic, social, cultural, and pathological dimensions of the problem which contribute to its intractability. Developed from current literatures on dynamical systems, realism, human relations, postmodernism, and the health sciences, the meta-framework offers a preliminary set of frames and guidelines for research and intervention with intractable problems that is informed in the dynamics of complex systems. The meta-framework was published as a three-paper series in Peace and Conflict, the journal of the Peace Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association (see Coleman, 2003, 2004, 2006).
Project on Constructive Engagement Theory
The importance and difficulty of eliciting and sustaining constructive forms of conflict engagement from the multitude of stakeholders caught up in situations of protracted social conflict cannot be overemphasized. Ripeness theory has been a useful starting point for understanding key underlying motives of disputants, but has limited explanatory power under these more complex, intractable conditions. However, a great deal of insight is emerging from work that is currently being conducted on the ground by scholar-practitioners employed in peace and democratization work in these settings. This research, begun in 2004, was aimed at eliciting this knowledge for theory and practice. We explore two levels. On a conceptual level, we are interested in better comprehending the nature of the underlying motives and constraints involved in different stakeholders’ decisions and actions surrounding conflict engagement. On a practical level, we are interested in identifying the specific strategies and tactics used by change agents to create the conditions for disputants to move away from destructive and deadly interactions towards more constructive and sustainable forms of conflict engagement. The research explored some of the various models and methods of constructive engagement currently being utilized with different groups in the fields of conflict resolution, peacemaking, dialogue and public engagement. Our aim was to elicit the core dimensions of the phenomenon of constructive engagement for the purpose of developing more robust theories and practices. It was published as a 2-paper series in Conflict Resolution Quarterly in 2008 (Coleman, Hacking, Stover, Fisher-Yoshida, & Nowak, A., 2008; Coleman, Fisher-Yoshida, Stover, Hacking, & Bartoli, 2008).
When West Coast and East Coast Meet Online:
A Cooperative Inquiry Involving High School Students From Different Social Worlds
The purpose of this study was to engage high school students from two different high schools who participated in an optional online forum in a critical reflection of the impact of their experience. The proposed study is viewed through the lens of social construction theory, transformative learning and Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). Engaging in reflective interviews followed by a cooperative group reflection process will heighten students’ awareness and help them identify perspective shifts, and perhaps transformative learning that may not have been apparent before this intervention or prior to the reflection. Another desired outcome is to deepen what we know about how engagement and critical reflection with others whose social worlds differs significantly from one’s own enhance communication and understanding. In the process, we hope to identify key factors for success in the engagement in an online dialogic process that may be applied to other educational environments and that the findings will help in curriculum design, particularly in the context of fostering critical thinking among high school students regarding intellectual, social, class and faith diversity and to support civic engagement.