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Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting.

Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafés (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures.

Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether.

Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.

Much of the management research on socially responsible investment (SRI) consists in demonstrating how SRI is good for business and good for society. But the belief that business and market-based strategies will bring positive social and ecological change is far from natural and results in disputes. This study shows how SRI proponents have to develop and combine arguments in order to construct and defend a valid and plausible discourse on SRI that could resist the critiques and appease the disputes resulting from its institutionalization.

We collect articles in the media to identify the SRI controversies. For these disputes, we look at the attempts of SRI to give a robust justification of the particular arrangement it promotes, vis-à-vis a public audience, and we discuss possible resolutions.

SRI focuses on appealing to conventional finance with a market logic, resulting in very few challenges of the legitimacy of the existing institutional order. In a few cases, SRI seeks a resolution based on a competing principles resulting in hybrid constructions of compromises, which could be consolidated by SRI models and tools.

The results contribute to a better understanding of SRI as it is perceived today, and of how the disputes around its mainstreaming may unfold in the future. This helps us clarify our expectations towards SRI and shows that if we want to address shortcomings in finance, we should probably not rely on SRI as it is defined and practiced in the 21st century.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the genesis, operation, and effects of a dispute resolution body known as the National Implementation Body (NIB). The NIB was established by employers, unions, and the State in Ireland and was active between 2000 and 2009. It recorded significant success in resolving major disputes. A distinctive feature of the NIB was its networked character: the body involved key employer and union leaders and senior public servants, who exerted informal pressure on the parties in dispute to reach a settlement either within the NIB process itself or in the State’s mainstream dispute resolution agencies.

The research draws on case studies of disputes and interviews with key members of the NIB.

The findings reveal how the NIB mobilized networks to resolve a series of major disputes that threatened to derail national pay agreements or cause significant economic disruption.

The chapter examines the operation of networked dispute resolution in detail and considers the wider implications of networked dispute resolution in both Continental European and other Anglo-American countries.

We first discuss what fairness may mean in the context of the dispute settlement process, noting the crucial relation between fairness in dispute settlement and the functioning of the trading system as a whole. We explore this relation further through an analysis of three main groups of dispute settlement cases. These are cases that turn around the question of defining fair competition; cases that arise from the use of contingency measures; and cases that draw the boundaries between domestic regulatory measures and the trade-related norms and rules of the WTO. There follows an analysis of experience with compliance and with the use of countermeasures in various cases. Finally, taking together the rulings of the Dispute Settlement Body and the procedures for compliance and the use of countermeasures, we conclude that while the present dispute settlement process serves to protect the fairness of the trading system as a whole, there are some aspects of dispute settlement that remain problematic from the standpoint of fairness.

This chapter provides a theoretical framework of dispute settlement to explain the surge in blocking incidence of GATT panel reports during the 1980s and the variations in withdrawn incidence versus total disputes across different decades of the GATT regime. The study first suggests the role of the degree of legal controversy over a panel ruling in determining countries' incentives to block (appeal) a panel report under the GATT (WTO) regime. The study then analyzes the effects of political power on countries' incentives to use, and their interactions in using, the dispute settlement mechanism, given two-sided asymmetric information regarding panel judgement.

Previous research on the success of the WTO dispute-settlement system may miscalculate the true benefits of the dispute process due to the nature of the datasets used. Approximately 33 percent of all disputes filed at the WTO are classified as pending or inactive and thus omitted from most studies. Further investigation reveals that many of these inactive cases were actually settled by the countries involved or considered in a similar WTO dispute, and, as a result, no further WTO action was taken. This suggests that the WTO dispute settlement process may be more effective in resolving disputes than otherwise thought. For those disputes not successfully resolved, I empirically estimate why countries may choose to initiate WTO dispute settlement action but fail to follow through, thus allowing the offending party to continue with the alleged WTO illegal activities. The results suggest that developing countries are less likely to resolve their complaints in the WTO dispute settlement system, a troubling implication for the equity of the system.

The present paper attempts to map the discursive relations between conflict and settlement as reflected in the realms of law and mediation during the second half of the 20th century, offering a 21st century model to combine the mediation drive to settle through reaching inter-subjective transformation with the legal drive to escalate and promote social conflict. Contemporary mediation, according to this model, should involve on the one hand “negotiating for justice,” according to the familiar models of problem solving and transformation, and on the other hand “fighting for law”: acknowledging the self-referential and ideological quality of conflicts, while emphasizing the pragmatic need to end them through an interpretive public act that involves value judgments.

Agricultural trade has generated more than its share of disputes in the past fifty years. Lack of a clear structure of rules to constrain government activity in these markets, coupled with the particularly sensitive nature of trade in basic foodstuffs, has been the main cause of this disproportion. New rules agreed in the Uruguay Round provided an improved framework for government policy in this area, and a temporary exemption was given to certain subsidies from challenge in the WTO (the Peace Clause). However, the expiry of the Peace Clause in 2003 and a growing willingness on the part of exporters to challenge domestic farm programs in other countries through action under the Dispute Settlement Understanding has once again stirred the agricultural pot. Now trade disputes are frequently leading to litigation, encouraged by the slow progress in the Doha Round of trade negotiations. In particular, the scope for domestic subsidies, under the Agreement on Agriculture and the Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, has increasingly become the subject of litigation. Countries may have to further modify their domestic policies so as to reduce their vulnerability to challenge in the WTO.

Purpose – The overall aim of the chapter is to explore how disputes between family members are accomplished and how the actions of copresent members (the mother and elder brother) contribute to the unfolding dispute.

Methodology – Selected from video recordings of the family breakfast, three extended sequences of mealtime talk were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system and analyzed using the analytic resources of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology.

Findings – This analysis establishes how both the mother and elder sibling intervene in matters to do with who has access to some bookclub brochures. Appeals to rules such as “you’ve got to share” are used by the mother to manage the local issue of the dispute. In intervening to resolve and settle disputes, the mother makes visible particular moral orders, such as sharing. Intervention is accomplished through directions, increasing physical proximity to the dispute, topic shift, and physical intervention in the dispute, such as gently removing a child's hand from the brochures. Justifications for sharing proffered by the mother that work to establish an alignment with one child are challenged by the other sibling, thus contributing to an escalation of the dispute. Also explicated is how an older sibling buys into the dispute, making visible his view about how sharing is accomplished; that is, you “just cope with it.”

Practical implications – This chapter has some practical implications for adults who interact with children (teachers, parents) highlighting that in some way, adults, through their actions may contribute to the continuation of a dispute and second, how adult attempts to settle or end a dispute may result only in a temporary settlement rather than a cessation of the dispute.

Value of chapter – The chapter contributes understandings about how family members manage disputes interactionally and how social and moral orders are accomplished during family mealtime. Additionally, it shows how some disputes are temporarily settled and connected across a section of action rather than ended.

A somewhat underappreciated aspect of the burgeoning rush to regional trade agreements (RTAs) is a discrepancy between the dispute settlement procedure (DSP) embodied in the original World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) and that found in the language of many RTAs. This chapter explores the issue in the context of a dynamic repeated game of trade agreements. As is well known, the institutional alternatives available in negotiating multilateral freer trade agreements – regional agreements, side agreements, trade dispute settlement punishments, and so on – can proscribe the limits and shape the nature of self-enforcing trade agreements. Here, we suggest the extent to which deviations from the WTO DSP embodied in RTAs – for example, “private interest access,” “third party procedures,” and “choice of forum” – can not only work against the interests of “weaker parties” but furthermore undermine multilateral agreements closer to free trade.