Arbitration & Mediation

Recommended books for mediators, ADR professionals: a brief bibliography

By Diane Levin

The latest issue of the weekly Mediate.com newsletter links to an article by mediator Barbara Brown which provides a “A Practical Bibliography of Books for the Mediation Practitioner“.

It is a comprehensive list of influential texts for ADR professionals, and I salute Brown for taking the time and thought to compile what is plainly a labor of love. This will undoubtedly be a useful resource for practitioners, and I already looked it over to see if anything essential was missing from my own collection of books on conflict resolution and negotiation.

The one problem is that it’s a very, very long list. With only so much money in the budget for books and limited time to read them, how does a mediator, particularly a new one trying to build a useful reference library, figure out which ones to acquire? That’s a question a number of folks often ask me.

So here’s my short list - absolutely essential titles that mediators and other dispute resolution practitioners should read. (Although it may provoke cries of protest, I do not include Getting to Yes, in part because it’s so obvious but also because it’s on my list for Reading to Complete Before Taking a Mediation Training.)

• Challenging Conflict: Mediation Through Understanding, by Gary Friedman and Jack Himmelstein of the Center for Mediation in Law
• The Dynamics of Conflict Resolution: A Practitioner?s Guide, by Bernard Mayer
• Bargaining for Advantage: Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People, by G. Richard Shell
• The Negotiator?s Fieldbook, edited by Andrea Kupfer Schneider and Christopher Honeyman
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini
• The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, by Scott Plous

So…what’s on your short list?

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Full post as published by Online Guide to Mediation on March 20, 2009 (boomark / email).