Course of negotiants - Case Study Example

Organizations feel the need for negotiations depending on three different perspectives. The first is when the parties involved are interested in establishing a relationship on a particular front and work towards reaching a common understanding on the connected parameters and constraints. The other case when negotiations usually take place is in the case of disagreements over a number of issues and this usually occurs on a wide range of issues right from economic to military/nuclear based decisions.

The other form of negotiations or bargaining is used by organizations when they are supposed to make a decision on or whose future course of operation is dependent on the decision by another organization. Typical examples of the last form are common case when a nation is deciding the amount of subsidies to be offered to a country from the third world (Muthoo, 1999). A lot of the negotiations are based on economic related issues and the most usual cases at an organizational level pertain to issues such as salaries, work conditions, promotions etc.

in the present case, the dispute between the AUT (Association of University Teachers) and the Universities in the UK during 2005-06 shall be discussed and an attempt shall be made to analyze the course of the negotiations by assessing against them against the various negotiation and bargaining theories that shall be discussed in the coming chapters. In 2006, the AUT was involved in a wage dispute with UK universities as their salaries had not been increased despite a rise in the amount of tuition fees.

As a result of the dispute in wages, the AUT was forced to observe a strike and this prompted the need for negotiations in order to settle the connected issues. The most important requirement to press ahead with the negotiations was the fact that the universities were concerned that if no proper action was taken, then the students' schedule would get affected as a result of the increase in the agitation on the part of the AUT. As the specifics of the negotiations are discussed, it will become clear that there was a lot of progress on a number of issues and a number of key decisions were taken during the course of the negotiations on issues such as increased wages and revised work schedules.

The dissertation will work towards analyzing a number of options that arose during the course of the AUT-university negotiations and this shall be done by analyzing the variables that determined the resulting outcome of the negotiations. The paper will also work towards establishing the various factors that influenced the course of the negotiations in the long run. It is also deemed important that the research also focus on assessing how things could have improved during the negotiation process and will attempt to analyze each of the possibilities.

The next section will comprise the literature review of the dissertation and will attempt to discuss the various theories by looking up at the various literatures available.LITERATURE REVIEW The previous section has provided a brief introduction about the purpose of dissertation and the basic issues that the research will cover as part of the current case study. However, the analysis is being performed by basing upon a number of theories that are an inherent part of negotiation and b