Strategic Procurement Negotiation

The challenges facing procurement managers across industries and public services are quite important. Businesses need to take care of the bottom line while public services need to manage tight budgets. This is aggravated by difficult economic environments such as the one that has come with COVID-19. Reducing procurement costs means less funds and working capital. Such is achieved by means of adequate negotiation processes. Technology procurement is a field with long acquisition lifecycles, where negotiations span over considerable periods of time, and where the features of technology may impact negotiations, including the technology inherent obsolescence speed. Such negotiations occur in an environment where demanding technical requirements abound alongside economic rationality and where negotiations are conducted by teams of managers and engineers, addressing the distinct dimensions. An approach to technology procurement negotiation is presented with viewpoints for reflection on how procurement and negotiations shall be addressed for technology procurement purposes.

Détente między Zachodem a Wschodem. Konferencja Bezpieczeństwa i Współpracy w Europie z perspektywy Polski

The purpose of this article is to analyse the policy of détente between the West and the East at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) from Poland’s perspective. The article begins with a synthetic theoretical and historical introduction concerning the formation of a new international order, particularly in Europe. The state of research on the CSCE in Poland is also outlined in a synthetic way. Then the analysis of Poland's role in the CSCE forum is presented in the context of the multifaceted negotiation processes in a chronological and problematic arrangement from the perspective of the theory of international roles. Endo-, and especially exogenous, connections concerning Poland’s functioning in the Eastern Bloc, including the hegemonic position of the USSR in it, were taken into account. Particular focus is placed on the implications of the CSCE Final Act for Poland. The article is based on Polish and English-language sources.

Contextual factors as an analytical tool: Exploring collaboration and negotiation in mental health interviews in prisons mediated by non-professional interpreters

This article proposes a framework for analysing interpreted events mediated by non-professionals. It is based on an examination of individual contextual factors rather than on traditional definitions of setting-based features. This approach promises to be more productive for the study of non-professional interpreting and for analysing contexts that do not fit into existing categories of setting. For these purposes, this article examines a corpus of 26 prison-based mental health interviews mediated by non-professional interpreters in order to analyse the collaboration and negotiation processes that emerge among the members of the communicative triad. First, it outlines contextual factors from a conceptual perspective. Second, it describes those contextual factors that are most relevant to analysing collaboration and negotiation processes. Finally, it describes the context of prison-based mental health interviews through the lens of these factors and examines their influence on specific instances of collaboration and negotiation extracted from this corpus.

„Das mustu gleuben, oder der Teufel bescheisset dich.“ Die invektiven Paratexte der protestantischen Lügenden und ihre gattungskommunikative Funktion

The article deals with the Protestant genre ‘Lügende’ (word combined from ‘Legende’ [legend] and ‘Lüge’ [lie]) as a disparagement of Roman Catholic legends in the 16th century. The investigation concentrates on paratextualisation as elementary invective mode of ‘Lügenden’. The analytical focus on titles, marginalia and so called ‘reminders’ (‘Erinnerungen’) shows the correlation between the generic term ‘Legende’ resp. ‘Lügende’ and the invective pattern of language use ‘Lügende’. According to this, the article discusses ‘Lügende’ as a communicative genre. Furthermore, by understanding ‘Lügende’ as a meta genre, whose paratexts are its basic elements of metaization, paratexts refer to text transgressions. Therefore, they are specified as secondary forms of religious communication during the denominational conflicts and negotiation processes in the 16th century.

Die Fresken des Palazzo Spreca

In the 1470s, Domenico Spreca, a citizen of Viterbo, commissioned a cycle of virtues for the sala on the upper floor of his palazzo. From 2012 to 2018, the frescoes, largely unknown in (art) historical research, were the subject of legal proceedings and, on a regional level, of public debate over the preservation of cultural heritage. Over these years, it became clear that objects not only require financial resources to protect and preserve them over the centuries, but also need to be part of a narrative. Such a narrative was lost at an early stage, although the frescoes bear extraordinary witness to the negotiation processes of the 15th century concerning political virtues. In this paper, I argue that the cycle of virtues should be interpreted as an allegory of good government. Domenico Spreca addressed the conditions of loyalty (fidelitas)/obedience (oboedientia) on the one hand and the authority (auctoritas) of the superiores – the Pope, the Curia and the Rector of the Patrimonium Petri in Tuscia – on the other. To facilitate comprehension of this interpretation, the frescoes will be embedded in the political culture of Viterbo. To this end, their interpretation will be preceded by observations on the institutional establishment of papal authority in the city and on how its citizens dealt with it in the 1450s and 1460s: an authority that they legitimised on the basis of its pacification of factional struggles within the city and demanded for this purpose, from which they benefited and whose arbitrariness they attempted to curtail.

Incredible Commitments

Why do warring parties turn to United Nations peacekeeping and peacemaking even when they think it will fail? Dayal asks why UN peacekeeping survived its early catastrophes in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Balkans, and how this survival should make us reconsider how peacekeeping works. She makes two key arguments: first, she argues the UN's central role in peacemaking and peacekeeping worldwide means UN interventions have structural consequences – what the UN does in one conflict can shift the strategies, outcomes, and options available to negotiating parties in other conflicts. Second, drawing on interviews, archival research, and process-traced peace negotiations in Rwanda and Guatemala, Dayal argues warring parties turn to the UN even when they have little faith in peacekeepers' ability to uphold peace agreements – and even little actual interest in peace – because its involvement in negotiation processes provides vital, unique tactical, symbolic, and post-conflict reconstruction benefits only the UN can offer.

Individual notions of fair data sharing from the perspectives of Swiss stakeholders

Background The meaningful sharing of health data between different stakeholders is central to the advancement of science and to improve care offered to individual patients. However, it is important that the interests of individual stakeholders involved in this data sharing ecosystem are taken into account to ensure fair data sharing practices. In this regard, this qualitative study investigates such practices from the perspectives of a subset of relevant Swiss expert stakeholders, using a distributive justice lens. Methods Using purposive and snowball sampling methodologies, 48 expert stakeholders from the Swiss healthcare and research domains were recruited for semi-structured interviews. After the experts had consented, the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, but omitting identifying information to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. A thematic analysis using a deductive approach was conducted to identify fair data sharing practices for secondary research purposes. Themes and subthemes were then identified and developed during the analysis. Results Three distributive justice themes were identified in the data sharing negotiation processes, and these are: (i) effort, which was subcategorized into two subthemes (i.e. a claim to data reciprocity and other reciprocal advantages, and a claim to transparency on data re-use), (ii) compensation, which was subcategorized into two subthemes (i.e. a claim to an academic compensation and a claim to a financial compensation), and lastly, (iii) contribution, i.e. the significance of data contributions should be matched with a corresponding reward. Conclusions This qualitative study provides insights, which could inform policy-making on claims and incentives that encourage Swiss expert stakeholders to share their datasets. Importantly, several claims have been identified and justified under the basis of distributive justice principles, whilst some are more debatable and likely insufficient in justifying data sharing activities. Nonetheless, these claims should be taken seriously and discussed more broadly. Indeed, promoting health research while ensuring that healthcare systems guarantee better services, it is paramount to ensure that solutions developed are sustainable, provide fair criteria for academic careers and promote the sharing of high quality data to advance science.

Islam Is Not a “Religion” – Global Religious History and Early Twentieth-Century Debates in British Malaya

Lately, Islamicists have called to discard “religion” as a conceptual tool and/or to use the “Qurʾānic term” dīn instead, arguing that “religion” entails Eurocentric bias. Analyzing how Fazl-ur-Rahman Ansari conceptualized Islam and religion in the late 1930s and early 1940s, this article presents a threefold argument. Firstly, I argue that a global history approach which examines in a poststructuralist framework how “Islam” and “religion” are used in concrete contexts is better suited to address the problem of Eurocentrism in both Religious Studies and Islamic Studies. Secondly, I challenge the scholarly thesis that twentieth-century Southeast Asian intellectual debates which referred to Islam as religion were mere emulators of debates conducted in the “West.” Instead of assuming isolated histories and ignoring Southeast Asian debates, I contend that the current use of and debates about conceptualizations of Islam as/and religion are the product of one and the same discourse – a result of global negotiation processes in which Europeans were as involved as Southeast Asia-based non-Europeans, even if they did not speak from the same position of power. Finally, I submit that the approach of global religious history opens new perspectives on contemporary Malaysian politics.