Using Cultural Categories forOpposition and Brokering in Conflict Mediation

Siobhan BrownlieUniversity of ManchesterOxford Road M139PLph. (0161)2753237s.brownlie@manchester.ac.uk

Abstract:Adopting an approach which espouses recent theorization in Intercultural Communication Studies (Holliday 1999, Kecskes 2014, Zhu 2013, 2015, Kim 2009, Dervin, Gajardo & Lavanchy 2011) and influenced by discursive psychology (Edwards & Potter 1992), in this article the author examines data from two contexts of conflict resolution practice: family mediation and workplace mediation (a university mediation service). It is found that in the family mediation data, parties construct a case discursively through ascribing oppositional cultural categories to themselves and the other party, and that the mediator does not interrogate this narrative. In contrast, university mediators use the ascribed oppositional cultural categories as a starting point for encouraging parties’ deep reflection on themselves and the other, and thus act as cultural brokers.

Suivant une démarche qui épouse des théories récentes de la communication interculturelle (Holliday 1999, Kecskes 2014, Zhu 2013, 2015, Kim 2009, Dervin, Gajardo & Lavanchy 2011) ainsi que des éléments de la psychologie discursive (Edwards & Potter 1992), l’auteur examine des données provenant de deux contextes de la résolution des conflits : la médiation familiale, et la médiation en milieu de travail (un service universitaire). L’étude démontre qu’en ce qui concerne la médiation familiale lorsque les parties construisent un récit basé sur l’attribution à soi-même et à l’autre de catégories culturelles en opposition, les médiateurs ne remettent pas en question ce récit. Par contre, les médiateurs du service de médiation universitaire jouent le rôle d’intermédiaires culturels, car ils utilisent les catégories culturelles en opposition comme point de départ pour encourager chaque partie à entamer une profonde réflexion sur elle-même et sur l’autre.

Keywords: interculturality, cultural categories, cultural negotiation, cultural brokering, conflict resolution, family mediation, university mediation

Article word count: 8,178

Biography: Dr Siobhan Brownlie is a lecturer in Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester where she is programme director of the Masters in Intercultural Communication. She is also a volunteer mediator in the university’s mediation service. Her recent research has focussed on memory, mediation, intercultural relations and migration.

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Using Cultural Categories forOpposition and Brokering in Conflict Mediation

This article examines two contexts of conflict mediation, henceforth referred to as ‘mediation’. The kind of mediation that we are concerned with first developed in the United States in the 1970s, and is often referred to as a form of ‘alternative dispute resolution’ since it contrasts with the court system and arbitration. Mediation is a means of dealing with conflicts where a third party (the mediator) helps the two parties in conflict to find a settlement and/or improve their relationship. Two major characteristics of most styles of mediation are that the mediator is a neutral (or more correctly multipartial) participant, and that the decisions on an agreement are in the parties’ hands with the mediator acting as a facilitator of the discussion between the parties (Herrman 2006). Mediation is becoming increasingly a preferred way of dealing with workplace, community, family, commercial and international conflicts. In the article two different contexts of mediation practice are discussed: a family mediation service and a university mediation service in England, UK. The clients of family mediation services are couples who have decided to separate and divorce. University mediation services deal with workplace conflicts between staff members and sometimes students.

In the article I focus on the use of ‘cultural categories’ in the discourse of mediation meetings. The definition of ‘cultural category’ adopted here is broad. Although ethnicity/nationality may be perceived as key factors, other cultural categories that are made relevant by the parties in the mediation meetings are taken into account. These come under areas such as gender, sub-national region, socio-economic class, educational level, profession, age, (dis)ability, faith, sexual orientation and others. The aim of the article is to explore the use of cultural categories as devices employed by parties to set up an oppositional narrative, and the potential use of those same categories by the mediator to further bridging between the parties. The term ‘cultural brokering’ is used to refer to acts of cultural bridging by a third party through increasing mutual understanding and facilitating negotiation between the two parties in conflict. Negotiation includes cultural meaning-making (Zhu 2015) and also accommodation (cf. Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005) in coming to an agreement to resolve the conflict. The article shows that different contexts of mediation embodying divergent goals give rise to very different practices with regard to how mediators approach the parties’ use of cultural categories. The originality of this work derives from the lack of research which has applied recent developments in the field of Intercultural Communication Studies to the study of formal contexts of conflict resolution.

Theoretical and Research Background

In the field of Intercultural Communication Studies there have been a number of challenges made to the major approach adopted in the foundation of the discipline which tended to equate ‘culture’ with nation, geographical region or ethnic group in a static manner (see Hall 1959, 1979, Hofstede 2003). Holliday (1999) proposed the notion of ‘small culture’ which designates any dynamic (emerging) cohesive social group at any level. Mediation comprises a series of meetings between the parties and

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the mediator. A small culture is created, since during the interactional encounters norms of verbal and non-verbal behaviour emerge in a co-creation by the participants. The mediator generally plays an important role in establishing/encouraging the type of content and modes of interaction in the small group of participants. From the start in joint meetings (meetings with both parties) mediators commonly set ground rules for the session and through the ensuing interactions these rules may be reinforced or developed. Mediators employ a range of strategies and discursive moves such as summarizing, de-escalating emotion, reframing, providing insightful comments, and asking circular questions. In the cases examined for this study the mediators’ actions are shaped by a further type of small culture which concerns the institutional context: the family mediation service and university service have their own established norms and procedures (Arminen 2005).

Another challenge to the static equation of culture with nation/ethnicity has been provided by notions of ‘interculturality’. The suffix ‘ality’ signifies a process, something in the making, but beyond that, different theorists have given different senses to the term. For Dervin, Gajardo and Lavanchy (2011, p. 12), interculturality is about the “processual dimension of encounters between multifaceted individuals” whose identities, knowledge and behaviour are fluid and evolving. Fluidity may be enacted through ‘cultural negotiation’ (Zhu 2015). Rather than interaction among people of differing backgrounds being taken to be automatically difficult and/or being limited to reductive labels, it has been shown empirically that communication is often the site of negotiation, that is, explaining, comparing across differences, revealing complexities, challenging assumptions, and solving problems (Kecskes 2014, Zhu 2015). One form of cultural negotiation is accommodation whereby one person in an interaction accommodates to the other by modifying culturally-shaped communicative behaviour, typically by adapting behaviour to become more similar to that of the other interactant. The aim of accommodation is to achieve effective communication and smooth interpersonal relationships (cf. Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005).

Such situations where new cultural understandings and behaviours are achieved through negotiation have been referred to as ‘interculturality’, a more specific sense than Dervin, Gajardo and Lavanchy’s (2011) mentioned above. Kecskes (2014) defines ‘interculturality’ as the development of shared understandings or focus between interlocutors from different cultural backgrounds during interaction. It is “a situationally emergent and co-constructed phenomenon that relies on relatively definable cultural norms and models as well as situationally evolving features” (Kecskes 2014, 97). Kim (2009, 395) also mentions the creative potential of interculturality which involves converting “challenges and insights into innovation processes and into new forms of expression”. An example of innovative interculturality provided in Zhu (2015) is a discussion among international students from the VOICE corpus of spoken English as a Lingua Franca where various speakers in the group bring in cultural knowledge from their prior experience to contribute to the emerging development of a new shared cultural frame of reference. In some of the exchanges among the students the cultural assumptions of a participant are challenged/corrected/complexified by another which provides an opportunity for cultural learning, since the student’s knowledge has been expanded (cf. Fisher-Yoshida 2005). The present study contemplates to what extent interculturality in the sense of developing new cultural understandings may emerge in mediation sessions.

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A further sense of ‘interculturality’ is coined by Zhu (2013). The term, for Zhu, refers to the discursive ascription of identity categories during interaction. She considers that although nationality/ethnicity are prominent in conceptions of cultural identity, a broader view takes into account the complexity of individuals who ascribe to themselves and others many different identity categories e.g. woman, parent, teacher, older person etc. which are no less culturally shaped. ‘Interculturality’ can be defined as the complex and shifting play of various cultural categories describing people and their predicates (attributed features, practices and activities) that are used and refuted in the course of a stretch of interaction. Across the duration of a particular communicative encounter various categories may be made relevant by an interactant for short lapses of time and may be accepted or not by the other interactant through sometimes subtle discursive and non-discursive means. Higgins (2007) shows, for example, how in the course of an argumentative encounter, a group of Tanzanian journalists ascribe to their colleague Mosi the identities of non-journalist and Kurya (an ethnic group) both of which he resists, before ascribing to himself the category of young person in order to excuse his temporarily disruptive behaviour. In the study of mediation presented below, the ascription of cultural categories by parties to themselves and the other party is described, as well as the potential indirect challenging of such dichotomized categories by mediators.

A number of theorists of conflict resolution (an umbrella category which includes mediation) have written about matters of ‘culture’. In contrast to recent developments in Intercultural Communication Studies, they generally assume a definition of culture as contrasting norms and practices of people from different parts of the world. One interesting issue that is discussed is the rich variety of traditions of conflict resolution practices that are found in the world. The ‘Western’ style of mediation (which my UK-based study partakes in) developed in the United States in the 1970s, but different types of mediation have an ancient history in Asia and Oceania, Africa and the Middle East (Brigg & Bleiker 2011, Gulliver 1979, Busch, Mayer & Boness 2010). Some researchers have explored different conflict resolution styles or approaches and linked them to national preference (Ting-Toomey 2010). Along with different culturally-shaped communication styles, such conflict resolution preferences may lead to divergent expectations and misperceptions when parties attuned to different norms are in contact. Warnings emanate from other researchers, however, about simplistic statements of cultural preference. In their empirical research Tjosvold, Leung and Johnson (2014), for example, challenge the idea that ‘Chinese people are collectivist, so they avoid conflict’. Similarly, Davidheiser’s (2005) detailed study of mediation in the Gambia highlights the complexity of mediation practices in this country. Drawing on their experience and research in Southern Africa, Mayer and Boness (2005) and Mayer (2010) note that cross-cultural contexts pose particular challenges: the principles of the mediation procedure chosen will need to be clarified, and the conflict mediator may need to play the role of a cultural mediator in terms of explaining culturally encoded meanings to the parties. A further interesting issue is cultural borrowing and hybridity: Monk and Winslade (2008) note cases in New Zealand where indigenous Maori practices were incorporated into a ‘Western-style’ mediation. In terms of methodology, these conflict resolution and mediation theorists have generally depended on observations and on gathering information from mediators, parties and stakeholders through self-reports or interviews. The approach in this article is different in two ways from those briefly sketched here. Firstly, as explained

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earlier, broader notions of cultural identity and cultural category are adopted following Zhu (2013), and secondly an analysis of interactional data is undertaken.

Data and Method

The data for this research come from two contexts of mediation: a National Family Mediation affiliated service in the south of England, and a university mediation service in the north of England. Family mediation services are used by couples who have decided to separate and/or divorce. They come to mediation as an alternative to solicitor negotiation or litigation in order to agree on arrangements with respect to division of assets and matters of custody and access to the couple’s children. As for university mediation services, some offer services to clients outside the university, whereas others have been established entirely to deal with intra-university conflict. The role of the university mediation service referred to in this study is to help university staff members and students deal with and hopefully resolve conflicts that arise. The university is a social microcosm encompassing people with a wide range of professions and from diverse backgrounds. Both groups of mediators in the study are qualified mediators, but whereas family mediation is a full-time occupation, the university mediators have another job in the university and do mediation on a part-time voluntary basis. The family mediators work alone, whereas the university mediators work in pairs on a case (co-mediation).

A fundamental principle of mediation is confidentiality. Ensuring confidentiality is one of the necessary measures for setting up a safe protected environment in which parties will feel confident in talking openly about their issues. This open talk is a key feature in making progress towards a resolution. Due to the importance of confidentiality, many mediation services are not happy about recording meetings and clients themselves often decline (personal communications: Ewan Malcolm, chair College of Mediators; Paulette Morris). However, in some circumstances recordings are permitted and agreed to for research purposes. The eleven family mediation recordings that were obtained for the present study were initially gathered by Paulette Morris for her PhD project in 2010.1 Representative of the full set of recordings, the data set examined in this article consists of two recordings of initial meetings between one party and the mediator of about 50 minutes duration each. At an initial meeting with one party the family mediator asks the party to tell their story, the role of mediation is discussed, and the party is asked about their wishes for a future agreement with the other party (Morris 2015). The university mediation service does not permit recording due to the principle of confidentiality, so I decided to organize meetings with mediators from the service in order to discuss their practice around the topic of cultural categories. Meetings were of one hour to an hour and a half duration. Four experienced mediators2 from the service took part with myself, the researcher, facilitating discussions. I am an academic in the university of which the mediation service is a part, and also a volunteer mediator.

The family mediation data is ‘naturalistic’, that is, there is no noticeable intervention by a researcher. In the cases examined, the parties built a narrative hinging on contrasting cultural categories in order to recount their situation with regard to their spouse. In the university mediation discussions, the first part of the discussion

1 I thank Paulette Morris warmly for entering into a data sharing agreement with me.2 I am grateful to the university mediators for agreeing to take part in this project.

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focussed on the mediators’ actual past experiences of mediation regarding various issues around the topic of cultural categories entering into conflicts. In the second part of the discussion, the oppositional categories that had come up in the family mediation data were explained and university mediators were asked what they would do in the university context if faced with such category-based narratives. The data are of two different kinds: recordings of practice itself, and recordings of discussions about practice. This raises the issue of comparability of content. With regard to the university mediation discussions, my intimate knowledge of the activity as a university mediator myself (who has co-mediated with the colleagues interviewed) makes me confident that the mediators’ discussion of general strategies reflects their actual practice.

The approach taken to analyzing the data is influenced by the fields of Discursive Psychology (DP), Conversation Analysis (CA), and Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA). Discursive psychologists are interested in how what are typically considered psychological phenomena such as memory, attitudes, emotions, the self, motivations and beliefs are constructed in interaction and for what purposes (Edwards & Potter 1992). Conversation analysts have been interested in revealing patterns in everyday communication in terms of sequencing of utterances in short or long sequences of talk (Schegloff 2007). Membership Categorization Analysis focuses on the categories that people ascribe to themselves and others during conversation as well as the features attributed to those categories (Stokoe 2012). It has been used by some researchers of interculturality (Zhu 2013). In a DP/CA/MCA approach, a recorded interaction needs to be examined as a discursive interactive event in which acts are accomplished. Thus, for the recording of the family mediation sessions, the following are examined: the category-based narratives of the parties, the functions that the narratives accomplish, and how the mediator interacts with the parties with regard to the narratives and for what purpose. With regard to the recordings of discussions with the university mediators, the content of what the mediators say about their practice or ideals for practice is discussed, and the discursive event itself is taken into account through indicating how interaction among participants constructs the content.

Analysis

The family mediation cases will be presented first, followed by discussion of the university mediator meetings. I will then compare the findings for the two contexts.

Family Mediation

The family mediation data studied includes narratives based on cultural categories from several areas: nationality/language; gender; socio-economic class; and family roles. Examples of the first two areas are studied in detail below. The functioning of cultural categories is similar in each mediation case. The data consists of the recording of an initial meeting between the mediator and one party, so in each case presented, we have one spouse’s side of the story. This is just one of a series of meetings which typically comprise the mediation process.

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In the first case, Terence3 (T) has come to mediation because he and his wife are undergoing divorce proceedings, and mediation will be used as a means for coming to an agreement on division of assets. The mediator (M) begins by asking the client to explain his situation. Terence provides a category-resonant description which ascribes to his wife the category of ‘person from Brazil’ or ‘foreigner’ from his perspective. The initial positioning in the narrative gives importance to this ascribed cultural category:

15 T: My wife is from Brazil.16 M: Yes17 T: So she came here (.) when we were married really.18 M: Right

Terence then goes on to say that he has an autistic son from an earlier marriage, and difficulties in his current marriage centre on his wife’s relationship with the boy. He ascribes to his wife the categories of ‘non-proficient English speaker’ and ‘person with a difficult communication style’ which are both implicitly linked to the ‘person from Brazil’ category:

41 T: The problem with Esmeralda ((the wife)) is that she doesn’t speak 42 English very well43 M: Right44 T: And when she does speak to Andrew ((the son)) she speaks extremely 45 fast and extremely loud46 M: [Yes47 T: [which is not good for him48 M: Yes49 T: heh heh with the things he’s got50 M: Yes 51 T: He just doesn’t understand what she’s saying and 52 M: Right53 T: And the high pitch54 M: yes55 T: It’s very difficult for him56 M: Right

Part of the ‘difficult communication style’ is said to be the wife’s nagging and demands. Terence recounts that sometimes the son has become so upset and angry that he has physically attacked Esmeralda and also Terence:

57 T: […] She’s onto him all the time ‘do this do this take this upstairs take 58 it down’ 59 M: yes60 T: He can’t relax 61 M: No. 62 T: ( ) sit down and watch the TV ‘oh you got to do that now’ 63 M: mm64 T: It’s the way she says it. She may not mean it quite this way.65 M: mm3 Pseudonyms are used for the names of the parties.

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66 T: That’s what he hears.67 M: yes68 T: And he gets very very angry.69 M: yes. And distressed. 70 T: yes. Yeah. Yeah. And ah we’ve had a number of incidents in the house 71 where Andrew really gets wound up and (1.6) he’s been attacking her 72 he’s also attacked me as well at times.

Notice how Terence quotes or ‘voices’ his wife (lines 57, 62) which provides vividness and supposed authenticity to the narrative (Edwards & Potter 1992). The phrase “She may not mean it quite this way” (l. 64) implies to the hearer that Terence is a reasonable man, and acts as a ‘stake inoculation’ (Potter 1996), that is, a statement which heads off the imputation of stake or interest in telling a particular narrative. Terence pauses noticeably in line 71 which indicates his difficulty in revealing the nature of the “incidents”. The mediator contributes to constructing the narrative with her phrase “and distressed” (l. 69). The categories that are resonant in the descriptions of Terence’s wife are ‘foreigner’, ‘low proficiency English speaker’, and ‘person with a difficult communication style’ with a causal attribution of triggering bad behaviour in the son. This contrasts with Terence’s depiction of himself as ‘British’ and a ‘well-educated person’ (at other stages of the meeting) who can successfully manage his autistic son:

76 T: What I’ve found is that when Esmeralda’s been away 77 M: hm78 T: for a month in Brazil79 M: Right.80 T: So it was supposed to be three weeks but it got extended because of the 81 problems at the airport.82 M: yes.83 T: It’s a lot calmer when I deal with Andrew (one on one)84 M: yes85 T: It may not be perfect how I deal with him but I can manage him86 M: yes87 T: on my own (.) in my view anyway88 M: Yes more calm.89 T: Yep hm.

Terence stresses orally his capacity in managing the boy: “can manage” (l. 85). Notice the elements of self-deprecation “It may not be perfect”, “in my view anyway” (l. 85, 87). These may also be instances of ‘stake inoculation’ (Potter 1996). As we can see in the passages above, the mediator aligns minimally with the narrative and the cultural categories in these extracts using acknowledgement tokens ‘right’ and ‘yes’, and she occasionally endorses the narrative with additional words, for example “yes more calm” (l. 88). However, much later on inadvertently the mediator indirectly challenges the narrative which places sole blame on the wife for the boy’s behaviour. Terence has mentioned that social services are involved, and the mediator asks why. After probing, Terence finally says that the boy was excluded from his previous school, and now has been excluded from boarding in his new school due to physical violence:

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311 T: He ((the son)) damaged a window and a door there so312 M: Right. 313 T: heh 314 M: So he sounds very angry doesn’t he?

Terence’s laughter particles (heh) seem to indicate embarrassment with regard to the boy’s actions. It is established that the boy is violent outside the home independently of the wife. It thus becomes apparent that another narrative version would be possible starting with the history of the boy’s behavioural issues rather than starting with the wife’s foreignness and deficient communication. The particular version told by Terence seems to be a factual description, but in fact it performs clear causal attributions which can be understood by the hearer (Potter 1996, Edwards & Potter 1992). The ascribed oppositional contrast of the spouses and the implications with respect to the relationship with the son not only place blame on the wife for the boy’s behaviour, but also place blame on her for the couple’s separation. The wife’s request for a large sum of settlement money is also therefore implicitly depicted as unreasonable. The mediator does not take up the issue of a potential alternative narrative which would challenge the oppositional categorization. Instead, as seen in her response above (“so he sounds very angry doesn’t he?”, l. 314), she goes beyond alignment to co-construct the narrative strand about the boy’s feelings. This is an endorsement of Terrence’s narrative by the mediator at this point, similar to previous co-constructions. In the second case Anne-Marie (A) also explains the reason that she wants a divorce by referring to a contrast between her and her husband Roger. She ascribes to herself the categories of ‘woman’, ‘emotional person’ and ‘good communicator’. In contrast she ascribes to her husband the categories of ‘man’, ‘non-emotional person’ and ‘not good communicator’. Here is a passage about emotion:

98 A: But we’re just so different ( ) And that really came out in the 99 counselling session that we had together. And the counsellor ↑only met 100 him I think ↑once by himself and then this might have been our first 101 session together and it was like a light bulb going on. And he said he 102 looked at me and he said most people in their lives follow two tracks 103 (.) the practical track’ there was a word for it but I can’t remember 104 what it was ( ) ‘and ( ) and the emotional track’.105 M: mm106 A: And he said to me ‘you Anne-Marie work on parallel tracks’.107 M: mm108 A: And he said to Roger ‘you don’t have that emotional track’.109 M: mm110 A: And I thought that’s why I find it so difficult to talk to him about how I 111 feel ( ) 112 M: mm

Anne-Marie’s intonational emphasis on “only” (l. 99) and “once” (l. 100) seems to indicate that her husband’s character is so obvious, that it took only a small amount of contact with him for the counsellor to be able to make his diagnosis. It is rather difficult to believe that a counsellor would make such a bold statement as “Roger, you don’t have that emotional track” (l. 108), but Anne-Marie supposedly quotes or

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‘voices’ the counsellor. Voicing tends to support the factuality of a report, and voicing a specialist lends credibility to the ideas by virtue of his ‘category entitlement’ (people in particular categories are expected to know certain things) (Edwards & Potter 1992). As in the earlier case the mediator aligns with the party through repetition of continuers such as ‘mm’. At other points of the interaction, Anne-Marie categorizes herself as being good at communicating about personal issues. This is a type of discussion which she says Roger avoids:

309 A: We need to sit down and discuss it and I tried on Sunday and he just 310 got up and walked away. And then my anger builds because311 M: you’re frustrated312 A: absolutely

In this passage the mediator completes Anne-Marie’s sentence. This collaborative sentence construction about an emotional issue is a way for the mediator to indicate empathy. The ascribed contrast between the spouses is resonant of cultural stereotypes: ‘non-emotional non-communicative man’ and ‘emotional communicative woman’.

The cases discussed above (along with others in the data) can be interpreted as involving dual oppositional constructions with regard to cultural categories. The party in each case employs socially sedimented cultural categories (Busch 2010) which are ascribed to him/herself and the other in the manner of Zhu’s (2013) ‘interculturality’. The categories are interactional resources used to construct the party’s own personal narrative. Within the narrative, the cultural categories and associated causal attributions are presented as factual descriptions, but they in fact support the speaker’s point of view and interests through being linked to specific reasoning patterns whose comprehension is facilitated by the ‘well-knownness’ of the categories (Edwards & Potter 1992). Use of the categories is in fact manipulative since they serve to reprove or blame the other party in some way; cultural differences are stressed in order to win strategic advantages (Mayer & Boness 2005, p. 89). While a story teller is recounting a narrative, it is normal practice that a story listener uses response tokens such as ‘mm hm’, ‘yes’, ‘right’ (Stivers 2008). This treats the story as being still in progress, and encourages the story teller to continue. However, it is possible for a listener to interrupt the story, for example asking for a clarification. In our cases the mediator rarely does this. In some instances, the mediator affiliates with the cultural categories and narrative strands through contributing to the elaboration of the party’s narrative. This seems to demonstrate empathic behaviour. Upon completion of a story it is expected that the listener will make a comment showing their attitude towards the story (Stivers 2008). At no point in the cases studied does the mediator take the opportunity to summarize, offer an interpretation, reframe, offer an insight or assess the party’s narrative. Thus, the mediator does not challenge the cultural categories and their ascribed causal attributions, nor does she encourage the parties to reflect on the oppositional thinking supported by use of the categories.

University Mediation

The meetings of the researcher (R) with university mediators comprised three meetings: one group meeting with two mediators (M1 and M2), and individual meetings with two mediators (M3 and M4). Because the researcher is a mediator in

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the service, she not only took on the researcher role of leading the discussion, but also sometimes participated as a fellow mediator. During the first part of the discussion, the researcher aimed to maintain an emphasis on the ascription of cultural categories by parties, as well as covering the topics of cultural negotiation, learning and brokering. In the second part of the discussion, the university mediators were asked their opinion about the family mediation scenarios explored above.

The researcher presented the participants with the notion of ‘cultural category’ which she defined as categories related to diversity with regard to areas such as nationality, ethnicity, regional difference, native language, gender, age, faith, (dis)ability, educational level, socioeconomic class, profession, and sexual orientation. Mediators M1 and M2 (who are also administrators of the mediation service so could provide a general overview) reported one type of diversity as the most common in mediation cases: nationality/ethnicity/language. Other areas of diversity reported by the participants as having played a role in mediation cases were disability, educational level/profession, and gender. In terms of examples of cultural category ascription that impressed themselves on the mediators’ memory, they recall cases which involved stereotypes and discriminatory comments. The mediators reported that they definitely “pick up” on instances of prejudice and also stereotypes which are central to the case. They undertake a subtle challenging, as illustrated in the following example. This case involves one party ascribing to the other the category of ‘woman’ and attributed features which were considered by the mediators to be sexist:

M1: I seem to remember one person who was quite hostile about like sexist comments about his female manager in the single meeting, not when they were in the room together. And we sort of took the tack of sort of saying, ‘you’ve just said there you know X, Y, Z’ you know ‘how how do you think that sounds?’, ‘how do you think if somebody said that, how does it sound to you?’ sort of thing. Because he was really quite derogatory.R: mmM1: Um so we just sort of took that line really.R: mm mm making them asking them to reflect on it. M1: To reflect on how that might sound and how that impression that might give4

M1 gives examples of direct speech using the pronoun ‘you’ (for the mediatee) that represent what was said or the kind of thing that was said in the mediation meeting by the mediators. Such ‘voicing’ (Potter 1996) provides vividness, a sense of reality, and implies reliability of information. Notice also how the researcher provides a formulation (a gist or version of what has been said, Edwards 1997) with the term ‘reflect’ which is then taken up by M1, building consensus among the discussants.

The researcher explained the family mediation scenarios which involve one party ascribing oppositional cultural categories in order to reprove the other party. The mediators were asked what they would do in the university setting if a party recounted the case using those oppositional cultural categories. It was felt to be likely in the university setting that narratives could involve 1) foreigner with non-proficient English versus British well-educated person and 2) non-emotional non-

4 I employ a slightly different transcription format from the previous section in order to distinguish the two data sets.

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communicative man versus communicative emotional woman. Here is some of the discussion of two mediators around 1):

M1: You’d have to pick them up on that, wouldn’t you, so um so if they’re saying ‘well it’s their fault because they’re foreign, they don’t speak very good English and therefore you know they’re rubbish heh at communicating’ say well um (3.2) I suppose you’d have to ask for an example of how they’d communicated badly and what you thought they meant by that and was it what they meant and (8.4) um yeah M2: It’s about how you do it. It depends on the situation so if you’d built some rapport with the person what you wouldn’t again want to do is straight off R: [mm M1: [yeahM2: Straight off at the start of the meeting kind of go ‘well actually you know have you thought about this’ but I find like um repeating what someone’s said back to them sometimes so it might be that you say something like ‘so you feel that the way that she communicates in terms of her culture not being able to speak English that way has this effect on your son’ and describe that negative effect. ‘Can you describe it?’ So really highlighting it you know […] if it is a language thing um ‘has there been anything done to resolve that? So what’s happened?’ You know. So you’re describing what the person’s said to acknowledge their feelings on the subject but then it could just be like an open question which is ‘Has anything been done around this?’

Notice the long pauses near the start of the above passage which indicate that participants are cogitating. This is not an easy topic to contemplate because it involves challenging the party somewhat while at the same time aiming to retain mediators’ ‘neutrality’ and rapport, as M2 says. M2 becomes confused and instead of speaking of the university setting, elaborates on the family mediation scenario. Nevertheless, general strategies proposed by the university mediators are clear: getting the parties to reflect more deeply through focussing on what they have said, exploring specific examples, and considering the broader context.

An important dual approach mentioned by several mediators is getting the party to reflect on their own potential contribution to the situation/problem, as well as getting the party to try to see the other’s point of view. Here is what M4 and R say co-constructively about the second case of the emotional communicative woman/non-emotional non-communicative man:

M4: yeah well I would want to know I’d want to ask her ‘well what does he need? If you need that, what does he need? Have you have you explored things from his perspective?’ R: mm so again getting the person to think about the other person’s perspectiveM4: yeahR: rather than sticking stuck with their own M4: yeah that’s you know um very much that and and about the self and how ‘when you’re feeling very emotional how does he respond to that? What’s what how is that (.) what do you think he’s thinking when you’re doing that?’ Get them to kind of go to the other side.

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According to the full discussions of the (hypothetical) cases, when bald oppositional cultural categorization or cultural stereotypes are a key aspect of the presentation of the case by the party, they are not simply accepted by the mediator, rather they are indirectly challenged. The mediator does this by delving deeper through a series of questions. The party is encouraged to give concrete details, provide examples, reflect on the impact of what’s going on, reflect on expectations, reflect on their perceptions and the other party’s intentions, question their assumptions, reflect on their own actions and words, reflect on the broader context, reflect on how the other party might think and feel, and express how they feel about what the other party reveals. Through encouraging deeper reflection, the mediator plays a bridging role between the parties which can be accomplished both in the absence and presence of the other party. It was also pointed out that in this process the mediator has to be aware of the influence of their own cultural background, stereotypical thinking and potential unconscious biases.

When asked if they felt they acted as a ‘cultural broker’ by enhancing understanding between people who categorize themselves and the other as different, the mediators agreed that they play this role:

M2: yeah, because it’s opening up those communication channels, so if it is around like cultural difference […] it would just be about opening those things up and trying to highlight them a little bit so they can see them, yeah so yeah

In the discussion of cases where the conflict centres on divergent communication styles related to nationality/ethnicity/language, M2 likens some actions of the mediator to those of an interpreter acting as a go-between who ensures understanding:

M2: […] people are kind of saying one thing this way and almost saying the same thing sometimes but it just getting completely lost in translation, doesn’t it? You know.M1: yeahM2: so trying using mediation to try and (.) interpret what’s being said and then say it again sometimes helps. I was saying before you want to facilitate discussion but you do almost have to like interpret some things that are being said but in a particular way so that the other person like hears it, you know.

This resembles the actions of Mayer’s (2010) ‘cultural mediator’ mentioned above. The university mediators thus play the role of encouraging parties to explain and discuss all matters including cultural identifications, ascriptions and issues. This results in interactive meaning-making (cf. Zhu’s ‘cultural negotiation’, 2015). In addition, university mediators may highlight cultural aspects, put information in different words to ensure understanding, and ask probing circular questions to ensure both cognitive and emotional engagement of one party with the other. With regard to another meaning of ‘negotiation’, one of the goals stated by the mediators is, if possible, to help the parties to come to an agreement on future actions. If all goes well, the mediator acts as the facilitator of negotiation (in both senses) which may involve bringing the parties to accept reciprocal accommodation (Gallois, Ogay & Giles 2005). An example from the researcher’s own mediation experience (case 2, 2016) is a party (not raised in Britain) recognizing that her communicative behaviour was “strident” as compared with British norms and accepting to tone down that

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behaviour in her workplace relations with the other party. Reciprocally, the other party recognized that she needed to be less avoidant and more self-affirmative in her communicative behaviour with the first party. When asked whether mediation can be an arena for cultural learning (Fisher-Yoshida 2005), the mediators spoke cautiously in that the mediation takes place over a short period of time, is primarily oriented to achieving some sort of resolution (rather than having an explicit learning function), and it is not always known what happens to the parties subsequently. But they said that mediation could light a “spark” towards greater cultural awareness. One specific example given of learning was that following a mediation experience a manager had a more heightened awareness when recruiting individuals from outside the UK about how the manager needed to interact with them (M4). University mediation may thus provide a forum for ‘interculturality’ in the sense of developing shared understandings and new behaviours (Kecskes 2014, Kim 2009). Comparison

Discursively the two data sets are quite different. In an actual mediation meeting, such as our family mediation sessions, there is an asymmetrical relationship of mediator and client where each has a quite distinct role. In contrast, the meeting of the researcher/mediator with other university mediators illustrated a more symmetrical discussion. With regard to what we can glean about the content of mediations in the two contexts, it appears that in both cases cultural categories may be a salient part of conflicts either implicitly or as an explicit part of a party’s narrative. The most noticeable difference between the two contexts of mediation appears to be that in family mediation the mediator does not challenge in any way the cultural categories which are set up in an oppositional narrative by the party, whereas university mediators will in an indirect manner challenge brief representations and surface level stereotypes, which are set up as an important part of the case, by asking searching questions.

This difference seems to be contingent upon the different institutional contexts where, beyond the commonality of some kind of conflict resolution, mediators in the two contexts have quite different roles and goals. Here is how M3 in the university mediation context expressed her goals:

M3: So for me I think that my role as a mediator is to facilitate ah the two parties having an understanding of where of what’s it’s like so to be the other person. So to facilitate empathy. R: RightM3: For each party first. And then to work with them towards an agreed ah I was going to say solution but not necessarily solution agreed actions. And those actions ah are meant to give them an opportunity to improve their relationship. So it’s really about relationship improvement.

The other university mediators agreed that improving the parties’ working relationship is a key aim of the mediation, and as part of that it is necessary for the mediator to “open the door” (M2) to the other person’s perspective. Opening the door means that the mediator may ask questions about discursively-expressed perceptions and constructions that one party presents about the other as well as about him/herself. Furthermore, the university mediation service is part of the Equality and Diversity

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section in the university, and as such, mediators recognize that they are sensitized to issues which relate to questions of diversity and prejudice, and, where significant for the case, will not remain silent on these matters.

In a parallel way, the family mediators in the cases above orient to their family mediation institutional context. In the mediation sessions the family mediators explain what the mediator’s role is, for example:

243 M: my role as the mediator is to manage the sessions and to keep 244 them moving forward rather than to fall back into what were the 245 problems of of the marriage.246 T: Yes.

In examining the family mediators’ discourse, in the two cases and others studied, it is clear that the mediators’ institutional role is not to engage with the parties’ past and present personal relationship, but rather to help sort out practical matters regarding finance, property and children. The family mediator needs to understand background to the case but does not explore it deeply. Rather, once some background and rapport have been established, the mediator is keen to push forward and get the parties thinking about financial and child access arrangements. It is noticeable in case 2 discussed above and others that the parties wanted to keep talking at length about the past and their current relationship and feelings, but the mediator kept directing their thinking towards the future arrangements. The family mediator’s role is stipulated in National Family Mediation documents and in training courses leading to qualifications (see Morris 2015). In the context of family mediation, the mediator will generally not engage in any questioning or challenging behaviour about how one party conceives of the other, and therefore will not encourage reflection on cultural categories or stereotypes used by one party to conceptualize themselves and the other party.

Concluding Remarks

In this article, data from two different contexts of conflict mediation were used in order to explore the use of cultural categories by parties and interaction in such situations with mediators. It was found that family mediators did not question the category-based oppositional narrative of the party used in reproving the other party and in fact sometimes ratified it through co-construction. The mediator showed empathy but did not explore the narrative because this would have led to focussing on the couple’s relationship which is not the objective of this kind of mediation. In contrast, university mediators reported that their general technique when presented with a party’s narrative is to ask further questions, to find out about impact, feelings and aspirations. This ‘digging deeper’ applies if the narrative contains cultural (including stereotypical) ascriptions and it may constitute an indirect challenging. Whereas the parties in mediation may use cultural categories for oppositional purposes, by encouraging reflection on those categories the university mediator uses them for the purposes of non-directive cultural bridging, since the aim of the questioning and challenging by the mediator is to open up one party to the other in view of the mediation’s end goal of improving the parties’ working relationship. The factors shaping whether a mediator in any mediation context would act as a cultural broker are the relevance of cultural elements in the particular conflict, and most

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importantly the specific institutional context of mediation which is (re)produced through mediator training and in the mediation sessions. Of particular importance is the ‘interaction ideology’ of the specific institution, which comprises preferred forms of interaction between professional and client (Arminen 2005, p. 38).

Several conclusions for future research and reflection can be drawn. Firstly, with regard to the relationship between conflict mediation and interculturality, two notions of interculturality have proved useful in the study and could be explored further in research on mediation: ‘interculturality’ as a process of self- and other-ascription of cultural categories (Zhu 2013), and ‘interculturality’ as a process of negotiation which can lead to new cultural understandings (Kecskes 2014, Kim 2009). Secondly, there needs to be sensitivity with regard to the importance of different contexts of mediation in examining the extent to which a conflict mediator may act as a cultural broker. Finally, the rigid procedures that institutional contexts tend to lead to could be questioned. Donohue (2001) argues that high affiliation (openness, trust) is very conducive to parties reaching an agreement, and Hammer (2001) concurs in saying that negotiators need first to address face and relational issues as a foundation for addressing instrumental incompatibilities (demands). In family mediation there would be a role for relationship improvement (the focus of workplace mediation) as an adjunct to the current procedures, whereby the mediator or other professional undertakes personal and cultural bridging.

Transcription conventions

(.) small pause(3.6) pause to tenth of a second( ) inaudible/incomprehensible speech(yes) transcriber not entirely sure of the words(( )) comment by the transcriber[ overlapping speechcan strong stress↑ noticeably rising intonationheh laughter[…] part of transcript omitted

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