National Football League Negotiation

Option 2: National Football League Negotiation

The National Football League (NFL) was formed in 1920 with 11 teams. It is currently divided into two conferences of 16 teams further divided into 4 four-team divisions. The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) acts as a labor union for NFL players by negotiating with owners.

NFL players and owners started negotiations in 2011 to divide revenue for its $9 billion a year business. The earlier NFL agreement was agreed on in 2006. The owners decided to opt out of the agreement in 2008 and it then expired in March of 2011.

Imagine you are a Consultant for ConsultWorks Inc., and you have been tasked to create a plan to resolve the negotiation issues (do not consider the 2011 resolution of this negotiation in your plan). Choose to consult for either the players or the owners. You need to conduct outside research to better understand the issues involved.

Review the planning processes outlined in Ch. 4 of Negotiation.

Write a negotiation plan of no more than 2,500 words and include the following:

• Define the issues and define how bargaining should progress, including the parties’ various objectives.
• Define interests, resistance points, and alternatives.
• Assess constituencies and the social context of negotiations.
• Define protocol for the negotiation.
• Determine methods to prevent potential negotiation impasses.
• Describe methods to manage potential impasses.

Format your plan consistent with APA guidelines

Contemp orary Approaches to the Social Contract
First published Sun Mar 3, 1996; substantive revision Tue Dec 20, 2011
The idea of the social contract goes back, in a recognizably modern form, to Thomas Hobbes; it was developed in different ways by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. After Kant the idea largely fell into disrepute until it was resurrected by John Rawls. It is now at the heart of the work of a number of moral and political philosophers. The basic idea seems simple: in some way, the agreement (or consent) of all individuals subject to collectively enforced social arrangements shows that those arrangements have some normative property (they are legitimate, just, obligating, etc.). Even this vague basic idea, though, is anything but simple, and even this abstract rendering is objectionable in many ways. To explicate the idea of the social contract we analyze contractual approaches into five variables: (1) the nature of the contractual act; (2) the parties to the act; (3) what the parties are agreeing to; (4) the reasoning that leads to the agreement; (5) what the agreement is supposed to show.
• 1. The Contractual Act o 1.1 Consent and Agreement o 1.2 Hypothetical Agreements o 1.3 The Importance of Actuality
• 2. Modeling the Parties o 2.1 Non-moralized v. Moralized Parties o 2.2 The Level of Idealization and Abstraction
• 3. The Object of Agreement
• 4. The Reasoning of the Parties o 4.1 Bargaining o 4.2 Aggregation o 4.3 Equilibrium
• 5. What Does the Contract Show?
• 6. Conclusion: The Social Contract and Public Justification
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries
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1. The Contractual Act
1.1 Consent and Agreement
The traditional social contract views of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau crucially relied on the idea of consent. For Locke only “consent of Free-men” could make them members of government (Locke 1689, §117). Now in the hands of these theorists—and in much ordinary discourse—the idea of “consent” implies a normative power to bind oneself. When one reaches “the age of consent” one is empowered to make certain sorts of binding agreements—contracts. By putting consent at the center of their contracts these early modern contract theorists (1) were clearly supposing that individuals had basic normative powers over themselves before they entered into the social contract (a point that Hume [1741] stressed), and (2) brought the question of political obligation to the fore. If the parties have the power to bind themselves by exercising this normative power, then the upshot of the social contract was obligation. As Hobbes (1651, 81 [chap xiv,¶7) insisted, covenants bind; that is why they are “artificial chains” (1651, 138 [chap. xxi, ¶5). According to James Buchanan, the key development of recent social contract theory has been to distinguish the question of what generates political obligation (the key concern of the consent tradition in social contract thought) from the question of what constitutional orders or social institutions are mutually beneficial and stable over time (1965b). The nature of a person's duty to abide by the law or social rules is a matter of a morality as it pertains to individuals (Rawls 1999, 293ff), while the design and justification of political and social institutions is a question of public or social morality. Thus, on Buchanan's view a crucial feature of more recent contractual thought has been to refocus political philosophy on public or social morality rather than individual obligation.
Although contemporary social contract theorists still sometimes employ the language of consent, the core idea of contemporary social contract theory is agreement. “Social contract views work from the intuitive idea of agreement” (Freeman 2007a, 17). Now one can endorse or agree to a principle without that act of endorsement in any way binding one to obey. Social contract theorists as diverse as Freeman and Jan Narveson (1988, 148) see the act of agreement as indicating what reasons we have. Agreement is a “test” or a heuristic. The “role of unanimous collective agreement” is in showing “what we have reasons to do in our social and political relations” (Freeman 2007, 19). Thus understood the agreement is not itself a binding act—it is not a performative that somehow creates obligation—but is reason-revealing (Lessnoff 1986). If individuals are rational, what they agree to reflects the reasons they have. In contemporary contract theories such as Rawls's, the problem of justification takes center stage. Rawls's revival of social contract theory in A Theory of Justice thus did not base obligations on consent, though the apparatus of an “original agreement” persisted. The aim of the original position, Rawls announced (1999, 16), is to settle “the question of justification … by working out a problem of deliberation.”
The social contract in contemporary moral and political theory is an attempt, then, to solve a justificatory problem by converting it to a deliberative problem. At its heart is the “question of justification.” As James Buchanan points out, “precepts for living together are not going to be handed down from on high” (1975, 3). Justifying social arrangements (showing that they have the requisite normative property, see §5 below) requires showing that all (suitably idealized) citizens have reasons favoring the arrangements. Now this would be an otiose requirement unless, to some extent, the reasons of citizens differed. If all citizens had precisely the same set of reasons there would be no point in showing what they all can agree to. The idea of a unanimous collective agreement only does justificatory work when the reasons of citizens can differ, and so it is an open question what everyone has reason to endorse—what everyone would agree to. Under conditions of reasonable pluralism, we cannot suppose that the reasoning of one member of the public is a proxy for everyone else's reasoning. Consequently, under reasonable pluralism the requirement that every member of the public has reason to endorse a social arrangement is not implied by one member doing so.
1.2 Hypothetical Agreements
Given that the problem of justification has taken center stage, the second aspect of contemporary social contract thinking appears to fall into place: its reliance on models of hypothetical agreement. The aim is to model the reasons of citizens, and so we ask what they would agree to under conditions in which their agreements would be expected to track their reasons. Contemporary contract theory is, characteristically, doubly hypothetical. Certainly, no prominent theorist thinks that questions of justification are settled by an actual survey of attitudes towards existing social arrangements, and are not settled until such a survey has been carried out. The question, then, is not “Are these arrangements presently the object of an actual agreement among citizens?” (If this were the question, the answer would typically be “No”.) The question, rather, is “Would these arrangements be the object of an agreement if citizens were surveyed?” Although both of the questions are, in some sense, susceptible to an empirical reading, only the latter is in play in present-day theorizing. The contract nowadays is always hypothetical in at least this first sense.
There is a reading of the (first-order) hypothetical question “Would the arrangements be the object of agreement if___” which, as indicated, is still resolutely empirical in some sense. This is the reading where what is required of the theorist is that she try to determine what an actual survey of actual citizens would reveal about their actual attitudes towards their system of social arrangements. (This is seldom done, of course; the theorist does it in her imagination. See, though, Klosko 2000). But there is another interpretation that is more widely accepted in the contemporary context. On this reading, the question is no longer a hypothetical question about actual reactions; it is, rather, a hypothetical question about hypothetical reactions—it is, as we have said, doubly hypothetical. Framing the question is the first hypothetical element: “Would it be the object of agreement if they were surveyed?” Framed by this question is the second hypothetical element, one which involves the citizens, who are no longer treated empirically, i.e. taken as given, but are, instead, themselves considered from a hypothetical point of view—as they would be if (typically) they were better informed or more impartial, etc. (see further §2.2 below). The question for most contemporary contract theorists, then, is, roughly:“If we surveyed the idealized surrogates of the actual citizens in this polity, what social arrangements would be the object of an agreement among them?”
Famously, Ronald Dworkin