How our worldviews shape our practice

Abstract

This article reviews research on the effect of a conflict resolution practitioner's worldview on practice. The results revealed patterns connecting worldview frames with differing uses of power. Forty-three environmental and intercultural practitioners were interviewed, and narrative and metaphor analysis was used to reveal key worldview orientations in their practice stories. The results are correlated in continuums and "profiles" of the worldview orientation. The findings strengthen previous work questioning the effects of the traditional neutrality stance, deepen fieldwide arguments for the embedded nature of worldview and culture, and describe new methods that reveal some of the dynamics between worldview and practice.

A Systematic Framework for Exploring Worldviews and Its Generalization as a Multi-Purpose Inquiry Framework

“…Initially our motivation was to understand how worldviews might be challenged by research findings in frontier science, but as we developed the framework we realized that it might be a useful contribution to all of the fields we have drawn on in developing it, including anthropology, religious studies, social science, theology, cosmology, psychology, philosophy, and systemology, e.g., [9,21,22,25,29,30,34,[36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]. We realized early on that systemology would provide a natural home for our work in this area, because:…”

Identity as a resource to shape mediation in dialogic interaction

“…They can be public or private, mandatory or voluntary. They also differ in terms of approaches to managing conflict and deal with a number of issues, for example, small claim cases (Glenn 2010;Heisterkamp 2006;Jacobs and Aakhus 2002), divorce mediation (Aakhus 2003;Greatbatch and Dingwall 1991;Jacobs 2002), environmental conflict (Goldberg 2009), mediation in international groups of adolescents (Baraldi and Farini 2011), the collective debt mediation program (Van de Mieroop 2011), just to name a few.…”

Storians: Building on Indigenous Knowledge to Enhance Ni‐Vanuatu Mediative Capacity

“…Nevertheless, we also experienced limitations in our facilitation in regard to worldview negotiations. At times the frames of Australian and Ni-Vanuatu worldviews were so di erent that aspects central to the MNCC worldview were rendered largely invisible (see Goldberg 2009), resulting in some level of imposition of Western worldview within the partnership.…”

“…We also note several examples of successful worldview shifts (Goldberg 2009), of participants increasing the range of their own worldview to encompass aspects of new worldviews. One example from the 2007 Port Vila con ict resolution storian involves one group's development of a hybrid process, integrating Western emphasis on analyzing con icts with Ni-Vanuatu values of the restoration of relationships.…”

“…e chiefs threatened to leave the storian and to take up a grievance against the MNCC. We realized that we were in the middle of a worldview con ict around aspects of axiology (what was important to this group of chiefs), ethics (what they considered to be moral behavior), and epistemology (what was considered to be "true" knowledge and how knowledge could be obtained in a good way) (see Nudler 1990;Docherty 2001Docherty , 2004Goldberg 2009).…”