Conflict

Where there is no conflict in a cooperation, one side has often stopped having aims of its own. What matters is whether the conflict leaves the participants standing as partners.

Conflict as the normal case

Whoever takes cooperation to be the absence of conflict will be surprised by every dispute. Anthropology takes a soberer view. Julia Eckert summarises the conflict theory of the German anthropologist Georg Elwert as follows: conflict is not an exception, not irrational or emotional deviant behaviour, and not necessarily destructive, but a “basic feature of all human coexistence” (own translation) [Zitat prüfen].

This also follows from what cooperation is. If the aims of others become the form of one’s own (see What cooperation is), those aims constantly rub against each other. Where they do not, people are often merely working side by side.

Elwert also distinguished how societies deal with conflict: through violence, through avoidance or through procedure [prüfen]. The distinction helps in small cooperations too. A team that neither fights out its conflicts openly nor entrusts them to a procedure has chosen avoidance, usually without noticing.

Conflict and recognition

Behind many disputes about substance lies another question: does my contribution count? Whoever argues about the allocation of tasks often wants to know whether they are needed. Whoever insists on a formality often just wants their position acknowledged.

Hegel described recognition as a struggle; Honneth speaks of the struggle for recognition (see Recognition). One need not share all of their views to see the practical core: a conflict that leaves the question of recognition unanswered will return, even when the substantive question has been settled. Mediation takes account of this by asking about the interests and needs behind the positions.

Productive or destructive

A conflict is productive when it is about the matter at hand and the participants remain partners. It then shows that something has changed, that the nail has turned into a screw and the common order needs adjusting. At the end stands a cooperation that fits its reality better than before.

A conflict becomes destructive when it shifts from the matter to the person, when it is no longer about a solution but about being right, and finally about harming the other. Friedrich Glasl described this path in nine stages, beginning with hardening and debate and ending with “together into the abyss”. Up to the third stage both sides can still win, after that only one, and in the end neither.

Along the way, the shared third is lost. The participants no longer look together at a task, only at each other.

Conflict online

Online, two things change.

Writing without a voice. Much online communication is written. A message lacks tone, gaze and pause, and the reader fills them in from their own mood. Criticism that would have sounded matter-of-fact when spoken often reads more sharply in writing. A friendly afterthought in conversation is, in an email, just one more sentence.

Pace. Online, one can reply at once, even in the first flush of anger. A dispute can escalate overnight in a message thread while half the participants are asleep and wake up to a fait accompli. Conversely, asynchronous communication gives time to cool down, if it is used.

Anyone who knows this moves from text to voice as soon as things heat up. And a sharp reply is better sent the next morning (see Synchronous and asynchronous).

An example

A project team works together across three countries. A deadline is missed, and in the shared message group a discussion begins about whose fault it was. The posts grow longer and sharper; individual sentences are quoted and turned against their authors. Two members fall silent altogether.

The two who have fallen silent have chosen Elwert’s second way, avoidance. The turn comes when someone proposes a procedure, if only a small one: to end the discussion in the group, meet live online for half an hour the next day and let the two who have been silent speak first. The dispute now has a place and an order. Had the thread run on for two more days, those two would probably have been the first to stop contributing, and nobody would have seen a conflict in it.

What this means for the law

In Elwert’s terms the law stands on the side of procedure, against violence and against avoidance. Against avoidance, however, it helps only if someone sets the procedure in motion.