Negotiated Order

Negotiated order is a theoretical perspective developed primarily by Anselm Strauss (1917–1996), who argued that virtually all social order is negotiated order. To accomplish tasks in social settings, people chiefly negotiate with each other. Through ongoing processes of negotiation, social actors alternately create, maintain, transform, and are constrained by, social structures. The negotiated-order perspective provides a means to understand the processes involved in both structural change and stability and to identify the social structures and conditions that shape those processes. It also permits researchers to address one of the central concerns in sociology—the link between individuals and society—by specifying how social actors respond to and changed social structure, whether they act on their own behalf or as organizational representatives.

The negotiated-order perspective enables researchers to examine patterned negotiations between social actors embedded in organizations and between organizations, occupations, professions, industries, markets, social worlds, or nations. Negotiations occur whenever acting units encounter ambiguity or uncertainty, when they define organizational routines differently, when they differ in their approach to problems, or when they create exceptions or loopholes for previously established rules and policies. When social actors settle on new practices, those patterns become part of the stable structure or “organizational background” that guides future negotiations. The perspective thus encourages researchers to incorporate historical data in their analyses by investigating how structural conditions arose in the past and observing how those conditions influence present negotiations.

Strauss (1978) offered this description of negotiated order at the organizational level:

With roots in the symbolic interactionist tradition, Strauss and his colleagues conceived of negotiated order as a critical response to structural-functionalist characterizations of social structure as immutable and as exerting a oneway influence on social behavior. They wanted to document and analyze social change by placing negotiation in the forefront without sacrificing respect for social structure.

[Page 526]While the perspective claims that practically all social orders are negotiated orders, this does not make structure a fictional concept, nor does it make stability impossible, despite some critics' charges that negotiated order overemphasizes indeterminacy. Proponents argue that not all aspects of society can be negotiated at any given time, but they also contend that stability in organizational life cannot be taken at face value—people must work together continuously to achieve and then maintain it. Moreover, they charge that because social conditions change through a negotiated process, any current arrangement that participants treat as inviolate may be the product of past negotiations. Simply examining a professional organized sport and comparing its rules and structure with the original game will demonstrate how today's stability was achieved through yesterday's negotiation and exchange.

The negotiated-order perspective provides a conceptual framework for studying mesostructure (see Maines 1982), a term that represents the intermediate social realm where individual action and social structure meet and where social orders are developed and invested with meaning. Negotiations occur within a negotiation context, which is defined as a set of structural conditions that surround and directly affect the content, process, and consequences of negotiations. Past negotiations may shape future courses of action, modify structural conditions, or undergo a process of sedimentation, whereby they join the set of standard operating procedures and become part of the social structure. Enveloping the negotiation context is a structural context, which consists of larger social patterns and interlocking demographic, economic, and political conditions. A structural context may influence multiple negotiation contexts for a given organization or for interconnected organizations. For example, if one looks at the corrupt practice of insider trading in the stock market, the structural context would include the regulatory policies of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission established via sedimentation from previous negotiation processes; policies and patterns of trade developed in publicly held firms; organizational and market conditions that inspire marketable information; the divisions of labor and workers' relationships that operate in law, banking, and brokerage firms; the web of investor relations in the marketplace; and the political climate surrounding the organizations and individuals involved in trade.

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