Reconsidering negotiation as a new organizational function: an empirical proposal

The financial crisis arisen during the fall of 2008 (possibly with a new restart, worldwide, in 2012), as predictable as it may have been, it has actually surprised most markets and economic actors, certain industries facing serious liquidity problems and a significant decrease in demand. In difficult economic contexts, most actors on the market reacted by enforcing two broad types of measures: cost reduction and enhanced barriers to market entry for new competitors, according to Porter’s model. These entry barriers are usually visible through an increase of the number of mergers and acquisitions. Many of these actions had not necessarily been predicted, which made some theorists of the management literature to speak of anachronism with regard to the classic strategic thinking of markets (Kotler, Caslione, 2009). As widely known, the core of managerial actions is classically constituted from mediumterm planning, usually for three-year periods. However, in circumstances of economic turbulences, even chaos, the traditional strategic three-year plan is anachronic and valueless, which impacts all the organizational levels and may take to apparently unexpected evolutions in the practice of company management and organization, just as we shall further show, in an attempt of the authors of this paper to rethink the place of negotiation as a distinct organizational function.