Negotiation and the Global Information Economy – By J.P. Singh

Negotiation and the Global Information Economy . Cambridge, UK : Cambridge University Press . xxi + 357 pages. ISBN 9780521731089 , $99.00 cloth . J.P. Singh , 2008 .

The world sees international events mostly through the eyes of journalists. Journalists report on events through the perspectives of the political participants. Though journalistic coverage is vital to the interpretation and understanding of these events, the questions are often asked, “What really happened?”, “How did it happen?”, and “Why did it happen?”

There are innumerable political interactions that take place away from the public eye: not because the interactions are secret, but simply because they are not considered “newsworthy” enough for public consumption. J.P. Singh's book Negotiation and the Global Information Economy takes us inside these interactions in a way that that explains a deeper and nuanced process for negotiating policy.

Singh takes us on a journey through “power configurations” defined as complex relationships between the interests of the actors and the processes of negotiations (p. 8). He makes it very clear that these power configurations are not based on traditional understandings of power, especially coercion. In fact, successful governance of issues in the global information economy happens when the “rules [are] negotiated by a plurality of actors in which interest alteration takes place, and mutual gains are effected” (p. 280). In other words, changes in the interests of participants, their personal and professional relationships to each other, and the contexts in which negotiations are made are not just understood, they are expected. He refers to this as “transformative” power and asserts that decisions made through negotiations in which there is this type of power “are more stable and democratic than [negotiation] rules that use coercion to make actors comply” (p. 280).

Methodologically, he creates seven thoughtfully chosen narratives that exemplify the range of power configurations that are possible in the international arena: global communications services, intellectual property, cultural industries, telecommunications, pricing, Internet governance, and data privacy. These are not simply case studies; they are, in fact, two-level comparative case studies. Singh juxtaposes some of these cases with each other to “show that the underlying power configuration within an issue also changes” as well as to account for “the feedback effect of negotiation processes on power” (p. 23). It is this feedback where Singh makes a great contribution. He has not just analyzed specific events; he has delved into the give and take (the feedback) of the negotiation processes over time. Each case study is useful in its own right as a narrative history of essential struggles embodied in these issues of the global information economy.

For example, in the early 1990s, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) came out of the negotiation process in which the World Trade Organization (WTO) emerged from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Chapter 3). Traditional wisdom is that the narrative of decision making was based on a strict adherence of the developed world to a story of free trade and economic liberalization. Singh discovers that this was not the case. Interest in GATS decreased among the developed countries, and the developing world “had almost a 180-degree turn in support of GATS.” In fact, “[h]ad the interest of countries, and in some case those of domestic constituencies, not changed during the negotiation process,” things might have turned out very differently and both “GATS and TRIPS might have had a limited scope” (p. 111).

Another example of a nonintuitive observation comes in the discussion of pricing (Chapter 5), in which Singh traces the history of transborder price negotiations for telephone and the Internet. He makes the case that the United States exerted control over this global discussion for three reasons: market power (intuitive), monopolist advantage (intuitive), and first mover advantage (less intuitive). Because the United States had a “head start over all other countries in developing infrastructure, content and user base,” it was able to dictate to a certain extent the outcomes of the price negotiations.

Singh concludes by extrapolating from those comparative studies broader knowledge of the negotiation processes. One argument he makes, amongst others, is the idea that transformative power allows “for ample wiggle-room for negotiation tactics to make the process participatory” (p. 301). This speaks to the larger academic discussion of multi-stakeholderism in international discussions, especially surrounding Internet governance (see Cogburn, 2005). Singh emphasizes the importance of the inclusion of a variety of actors as interests change. Changing agendas allow for different participants along the way, “informational and technocratic tactics can suggest possibilities unavailable earlier”; changing coalitions can “provide autonomy to negotiators” (p. 301).

The research leaves us with some probing thoughts: “This book advances a theory of negotiated interests. The games that actors play are more dynamic and open-ended than accounted for by our current theories on the constraints imposed by power structures” (p. 279). Singh proposes a theory of process, not outcomes. But one thing he does not address fully is the speed of the processes. The implication is that all negotiation takes time, but underlying this is a suggestion that there could be moments of what Stephen Jay Gould (2007) called “punctuated equilibrium” or the idea that change can happen very quickly and very dramatically while generally going in a steady direction. What might affect the speed of the negotiation process?

In addition, while justifying the cases he uses, there is scant discussion of how representative they are in the universe of possible examples of information related issues. Sometimes the cases we use are chosen because of they are stark examples of what we want to explore. It is a trade-off, one which Singh puts to good use.