Distributive justice and the durability of peace agreements

This study explores the relationship between principles of distributive justice (DJ) and the durability of negotiated agreements. Sixteen peace agreements negotiated during the early 1990s were coded for the centrality of each of four principles of DJ – equality, proportionality, compensation, and need – to the core terms of the agreement. The agreements were also assessed on scales of implementation and durability over a five-year period. Another variable included in the analysis was the difficulty of the conflict environment. These data were used to evaluate three sets of hypotheses: the relationship between DJ and durability, the role of the conflict environment, and types of DJ principles. The results obtained from both statistical and focused-comparison analyses indicate that DJ moderates the relationship between conflict environments and outcomes: when principles of justice are central to an agreement, the negative effects of difficult conflict environments are reduced; when principles are not central, the negative effects of difficulty are heightened. These relationships are accounted for primarily by one of the four DJ principles – equality. Implications of these findings are discussed along with a number of ideas for further research

Operational research and organizational development

A large research program concerned with the contribution of operational research (OR) to the design of organizations led indirectly to an OR project concerned with constructing a man-computer interactive simulation model for a department in local government. The simulation model was to map the decision-making activities of the department and their influence on critical features of the environment which were of interest. The most difficult part of this project was the application of new methodologies for eliciting the values, norms, objectives, goals, and views of the environment in order that the model of decision-making could be constructed. The key concepts underlying the method were drawn from the psychology of personal constructs and the sociology of defining situations. The data analysis resulting from an application of these concepts led to the organization wishing to become involved in an organization development (OD) exercise. How this request evolved, the conceptual basis of the OR, and some of the repercussions of the OD work on effective OR are what the paper is about