Conflict

Conflict is actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests. A conflict can be internal (within oneself) to individuals. Conflict as a concept can help explain many aspects of social life such as social disagreement, conflicts of interests, and fights between individuals, groups, or organizations. In political terms, "conflict" can refer to wars, revolutions or other struggles, which may involve the use of force as in the term armed conflict. Without proper social arrangement or resolution, conflicts in social settings can result in stress or tensions among stakeholders. When an interpersonal conflict does occur, its effect is often broader than two individuals involved, and can affect many associate individuals and relationships, in more or less adverse, and sometimes even way.

Conflict as taught for graduate and professional work in conflict resolution (which can be win-win, where both parties get what they want, win-lose where one party gets what they want, or lose-lose where both parties don't get what they want) commonly has the definition: "when two or more parties, with perceived incompatible goals, seek to undermine each other's goal-seeking capability".

A clash of interests, values, actions or directions often sparks a conflict. Conflicts refer to the existence of that clash. Psychologically, a conflict exists when the reduction of one motivating stimulus involves an increase in another, so that a new adjustment is demanded. The word is applicable from the instant that the clash occurs. Even when we say that there is a potential conflict we are implying that there is already a conflict of direction even though a clash may not yet have occurred.

Contents [hide] 1 Phases of conflict 2 Types of conflict 3 Ways of addressing conflict 4 Ongoing conflicts 5 See also 6 References

 Phases of conflict

• Prelude to Conflict: Variables that make conflict possible between those involved
• Triggering Event: A particular event, such as criticism which creates the conflict
• Initiation Phase: Occurs when at least one person makes it known to the other that a conflict exists
• Differentiation Phase: Parties raise the conflict issues and pursue reasons for the varying positions
• Integration stage / Resolution: Parties acknowledge common grounds and explore possibilities to move towards a solution

Types of conflict

The lists in this article may contain items that are not notable, encyclopedic, or helpful. Please help out by removing such elements and incorporating appropriate items into the main body of the article. (October 2009)

A conceptual conflict can escalate into a verbal exchange and/or result in fighting. Conflict can exist at a variety of levels of analysis:

• community conflict
• diplomatic conflict
• economic conflict
• emotional conflict
• environmental resources conflict
• external conflict
• group conflict
• ideological conflict
• international conflict
• interpersonal conflict
• intersocietal conflict
• intellectual conflict
• intrastate conflict (for example: civil wars, election campaigns)
• intrapersonal conflict (though this usually just gets delegated out to psychology)
• organizational conflict
• intra-societal conflict
• military conflict
• religious-based conflict (for example: Center For Reduction of Religious-Based Conflict).
• workplace conflict
• data conflict
• relationship conflict
• racial conflict

Conflicts in these levels may appear "nested" in conflicts residing at larger levels of analysis. For example, conflict within a work team may play out the dynamics of a broader conflict in the organization as a whole. (See Marie Dugan's article on Nested Conflict. John Paul Lederach has also written on this.) Theorists have claimed that parties can conceptualize responses to conflict according to a two-dimensional scheme; concern for one's own outcomes and concern for the outcomes of the other party. This scheme leads to the following hypotheses:

• High concern for both one's own and the other party's outcomes leads to attempts to find mutually beneficial solutions.
• High concern for one's own outcomes only leads to attempts to "win" the conflict.
• High concern for the other party's outcomes only leads to allowing the other to "win" the conflict.
• No concern for either side's outcomes leads to attempts to avoid the conflict.

Often a group finds itself in conflict over facts, goals, methods or values. It is critical that it properly identify the type of conflict it is experiencing if it hopes to manage the conflict through to resolution. For example, a group will often treat an assumption as a fact.

The more difficult type of conflict is when values are the root cause. It is more likely that a conflict over facts, or assumptions, will be

• personality conflict
• value differences
• goal differences
• methodological differences
• substandard performance
• lack of cooperation
• differences regarding authority
• differences regarding responsibility
• competition over resources
• non-compliance with rules (LO)

A definition of a conflict can be the subject of legal action has three invariants^[1] :

• legal
• technical
• emotional

Ways of addressing conflict

Five basic ways of addressing conflict were identified by Thomas and Kilmann in 1976:^[2][3]

• Accommodation – surrender one's own needs and wishes to accommodate the other party.
• Avoidance – avoid or postpone conflict by ignoring it, changing the subject, etc. Avoidance can be useful as a temporary measure to buy time or as an expedient means of dealing with very minor, non-recurring conflicts. In more severe cases, conflict avoidance can involve severing a relationship or leaving a group.^[4]
• Collaboration – work together to find a mutually beneficial solution. While the Thomas Kilman grid views collaboration as the only win-win solution to conflict, collaboration can also be time-intensive and inappropriate when there is not enough trust, respect or communication among participants for collaboration to occur.
• Compromise – bring the problem into the open and have the third person present. The aim of conflict resolution is to reach agreement and most often this will mean compromise.^[5]
• Competition – assert one's viewpoint at the potential expense of another. It can be useful when achieving one's objectives outweighs one's concern for the relationship.^[6]

The Thomas Kilmann Instrument can be used to assess one's dominant style for addressing conflict.^[7]

[edit] Ongoing conflicts

Main article: Ongoing conflicts

Many NGOs and independent groups attempt to monitor the situation of ongoing conflicts. Unfortunately, the definitions of war, conflict, armed struggle, revolution and all these words which describe violent opposition between States or armed organised groups, are not precise enough to distinguish one from another. For example, the word terrorism is used indifferently by many governments to delegitimate every kind of armed revolt and, at the same time, by many rebel groups to delegitimate the armed repression of sovereign.

See also

• Cost of conflict
• Competition
• Conflict management
• List of ongoing conflicts worldwide with cumulative fatalities
• Conflict: Middle East Political Simulator
• Conflict (air traffic control)
• Conflict style inventory
• Copenhagen Consensus
• Dispute
• Facilitation
• Game theory
• Negotiation
• Protracted social conflict
• Conflict (narrative)

 References

1. ^ Code de la Médiation, Agnès Tavel et Jean-Louis Lascoux, Médiateurs Editeurs, France, 2009
2. ^ Resolving Workplace Conflict, Colorado University.
3. ^ Five Problem Solving Methods
4. ^ Managing Conflict within or between Groups, Timor Australia Friendship Manual.
5. ^ Caroline Brem (1995). "Are we on the same team here?" Allen& Unwin Pty Ltd.(P.42)
6. ^ Conflict Management, FAO Corporate Document Repository.
7. ^ Analyze Your Conflict Management Style: The Thomas Kilmann Instrument

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict"

Categories: Aggression | Conflict | Dispute resolution

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More on globalisation in education
Post modern globalisation
Gobalisation in education in the Americas
The American Prospect - globalization

ESSAY: GLOBALIZATION AND EDUCATION AS A COMMODITY by William Tabb, Queens College and the Grad Center CLARION SUMMER 2001 PSC HOME PAGE OTHER CLARION ARTICLES "The university will be a very different place in another decade or two, and what it will look like depends to a large degree on what version of globalization wins out." "The idea of wresting academic control from the faculty is at the heart of such business models. It adds up to educational Taylorism—treating the art of teaching in the same way that Henry Ford treated the manufacture of automobiles, breaking skilled labor down into a series of lower-skilled tasks, assigning some tasks to machines and imposing strict managerial control over the rest."   When people think about globalization, most focus on sweatshop labor and the loss of manufacturing jobs overseas. It is easy to understand the race to the bottom that results as factory workers in one place face more intense competition from lower-cost labor on the other side of the world. College teachers would do well, however, to include their own future prospects as they consider the impact of globalization over the coming years. The university will be a very different place in another decade or two, and what it will look like depends to a large degree on what version of globalization wins out. Today we are often told that education must be made more efficient by being forced into the market model, moving away from the traditional concept of education as a publicly provided social good. This neoliberalism—the belief that today’s problems are best addressed by the market, and that government regulation and the public sector should both be as minimal as possible—is not unique to debates over education: it dominates economics, politics and ideology in the U.S. and most of the world. There are three elements involved in the neoliberal model of education: making the provision of education more cost-efficient by commodifying the product; testing performance by standardizing the experience in a way that allows for multiple-choice testing of results; and focusing on marketable skills. The three elements are combined in different policies—cutbacks in the public sector, closing “inefficient” programs that don’t directly meet business needs for a trained workforce, and the use of computers and distance learning, in which courses and degrees are packaged for delivery over the Internet by for-profit corporations. Market Mantra: Cut, Cut, Cut Corporate provision of education will seem increasingly appealing as traditional schools are deprived of funds. The corporate model stresses rewarding winners and letting losers adjust. “In the 1990s U.S. companies cut costs, jettisoned marginal efforts, bolstered internal cooperation and formed strategic alliances. Hold on to your hats—universities are set to do the same.” This was how Robert Buderi, writing last year in Technology Review, began “From the Ivory Tower to the Bottom Line,” one of many essays on how today’s university doesn’t jibe with today’s competitive environment, and requires market-oriented reorganization. Buderi makes clear that the kind of selective excellence being pitched in the CUNY Board of Trustees’ Master Plan is part of the corporatization of the university which, like globalization itself, is being touted as both inevitable and desirable. What is the rationale for this program of cut, cut, cut? Why has it been considered necessary for public education to tighten its belt, year after year? The drive for “market solutions” is not the result of some force of nature, as its proponents pretend. It is a policy decision to abandon the needs of the poor and leave them to shift for themselves. It is the same logic that forces the poorest countries of the world into the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, with their drastic cuts in public services. The Third World may have been hit first and hardest, but the same pattern can be seen in New York State, in the de-funding of CUNY and the disinvestments in public education as a whole. Justice Leland DeGrasse’s landmark ruling of January 2001 in fact declared that the state has deprived New York City’s children of the “sound, basic education” guaranteed by the state constitution. “The majority of the city’s public school students leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for college and unprepared for the duties placed upon them by a democratic society.” CUNY faculty know this all too well as we are blamed and penalized for not being able to make up for the years of deprivation, thanks to these same officials. This might seem to be a local problem—except that public education is under attack in many places, as part of a neoliberal strategy that uses reform as a cover for cutback. In practice, the principal objective of such reforms is to begin a process of privatizing education by starving public-sector schools in the name of forcing them to compete.  The Civil Society Network for Public Education in the Americas, a group that brings together South, Central and North American workers in education, notes that “in developing countries that apply austerity measures, this system has generally led to the reduction of educational resources for the poorest regions.” Serge Jonque Educators and other public workers joined FTAA protests in Quebec. Here is where globalization enters the picture. The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement (the recent target of protests by educators and others in Quebec) would demand equal treatment for corporate providers of public services. Thus, a company like Edison, whose bid to take over several public schools in New York was rejected by a vote of parents, could appeal to an international tribunal and sue the city for being treated “unfairly.” Government “subsidies” to CUNY could be challenged as providing an “unfair” advantage over for-profit companies that want to offer competitive educational services. These agreements define educational services as a tradable commodity and so require it to be treated like any other product. Taking Away Control The idea of wresting academic control from the faculty is at the heart of such business models. It adds up to educational Taylorism—treating the art of teaching in the same way that Henry Ford treated the manufacture of automobiles, breaking skilled labor down into a series of lower-skilled tasks, assigning some tasks to machines and imposing strict managerial control over the rest. One important tool for transforming the educational workplace is distance learning. The idea is to develop learning modules in which the knowledge of the faculty is extracted and implanted into on-line programs owned and controlled by management. This requires the kind of standardization that typifies the commodified model of education: standardized testing and straight-jacket learning plans. Already imposed on high school teachers, the higher-education counterpart can be found in new corporate providers of college degrees. The plan is to take knowledge from the heads and hearts of teachers and put it into CDs and online courses, creating an interchangeable education that can be as standardized as Starbucks or Wal-Mart. Fearful that such new “brands” such as Phoenix University and other providers will drive them from the distance-learning market, many colleges and universities have created their own for-profit subsidiaries. Such education can be sold globally. Distance is no longer an obstacle. Education markets merge as distance becomes irrelevant to this commodified credentialing. “For online education to become mainstream is kind of a depressing thought, because it is such a crappy experience,” Marc Eisenstadt, a distance learning researcher in the UK recently told The Wall Street Journal. “The bottom line is that learning online is a soul-destroying experience. . . . It’s always second-best” to face-to-face learning. But if governments won’t pay for first-best, most students will end in private-company college “equivalent” facilities with interchangeable adjunct instructors teaching out of corporate-designed lesson plans, or being “educated” by a computer screen and a one-size-fits-all course package from some other for-profit corporation. It is CUNY students who will be relegated to such second- or third-class choices. The children of the affluent will attend traditional colleges and universities. This scenario is not far away if we let current trends continue. Destroying the quality of public-sector education is necessary for the full marketization of education. There is ample polling evidence that the politics that pays for tax cuts with service cuts is not favored by most Americans and other citizens around the world. What corporate globalization has done is tell us there is no alternative. But if we think government exists to serve all of the people, not just the rich and powerful, the neoliberal model must be resisted. This struggle goes on globally, but it will be decided in a series of struggles which are local. What is happening to CUNY is not unique. The bumper sticker that tells us to “Think Globally – Act Locally” is good advice. The PSC is on to something. The union’s new focus on the need to rebuild CUNY as a great university recognizes that it is inadequate to oppose marketization without offering an alternative. Our alternative is a counter-understanding of the goals of education, as enhancing critical citizenship, personal development and the participation in culture that is the right of all students in a democracy. Instead of a race to the bottom and growing inequality, a healthy public sector can redistribute opportunity so that we can have a leveling up. This, after all, is the historic mission of the City University. Our union is leading the way in defending public education, and with it a democratic vision of the future of our city and global society. The PSC’s success will depend in significant measure on our participation. back to PSC HOME page other CLARION articles

Social Studies - Globalisation in education

Globalisation in relation to education.

Globalisation in education results to:-

a)    Virtual education

b)    E-learning

c)    Long distance learning

Virtual education

Definition

–         Instruction in the learning environment where the teacher and students when the teachers and students are separated by time and/or space.

Mode (How do the students being educated without the teacher being there?)

-          Teachers are being replaced by Management Application(s).

•Management Application(s)-------•Multimedia resources = •Internet     +     •Video conferencing

Positive(s) of virtual education

-          Wide range of resources.

-          ‘Study at any time/space’

Negative(s) of virtual education

-          Emotional aspect cannot be shared.

-          Not reliable. (Cannot be used if there is no electricity)

-          Not much human contact.

-          The source cannot be trusted.(The validity is questioned : maybe the knowledge is given by not qualified person)

Future trends of education in Malaysia:

-          Virtual education

-          Teachers come in hologram form.

-          No more books are needed.

-          Online tuition.

-          More computer lab.

-          Virtual glasses(Spectacles which can display/provide information)

-          Café ‘edu’ replaces cyber cafe(cyber café which serves the purpose of education only)

Impact(s) of virtual education on individual, society, economy, politic, and technology:-

Classification(s)	Positive(s)	Negative(s)
Individual	-          More independent and up to date. -          Hardworking(Learn at your own pace) -          Do not need to wait for lecturer. -          Advanced & knowledgeable.	-          Dependent to computer & internet(Can’t do anything if blackout, resources maybe wrong) -          Lazy (Learn at your own pace) -          Socially handicap. -          Do not develop soft skills. -          Unhealthy(Don’t train themselves, no practical in sports but only theory) -          Uncaring and selfish.
Society	-          Advanced & knowledgeable. -          Up to date.	-          Uncaring and selfish. -          Face isolation. -          Unhealthy (Do not train themselves) -          No more Olympic or other sport games. -          More disciplinary/crime problems(People are not taught about values)
Economy	-          Wider market. -          Marketable. -          More challenging market(Healthy competition)	-          More online fraud (Credit card fraud) -          Online gambling becomes rampant.
Politic	-          Keeps you updated.	-          Biased information provided. -          Indoctrination (Impose one’s values, ideas, and thoughts)
Technology	-          More advanced. -          Keeps on changing for better.	-          Poor people will be affected(They cannot afford to buy computers)