Jeremy Sutra had been a teaching professor in a communication department at a California State university for fifteen years and was taking a sabbatical to renew his research skills and begin a concentrated research program. He had decided to visit another university to work with a group of well-known researchers. After making the necessary contacts, he had been accepted and welcomed as a visiting professor in a major communication program in Massachusetts.

Soon after arriving in the northeast, he began working with Josh Winters, a highly published and well-respected scholar in the communication field, on a study of the conflict between the Moral Majority and its liberal critics. The study involved the careful examination of the discourse, including speeches, newsletter articles, books, tapes, and films, produced by each side in this conflict. Jeremy and Josh worked throughout the year on a paper on this problem to be submitted for publication.

In the meantime, Josh had been approached by the university mediation center about studying the dispute mediation process. The mediation center specialized in helping citizens settle their disputes of all kinds through negotiation and compromise. Josh asked Jeremy if he would like to participate, and Jeremy agreed enthusiastically. Over the course of several months, they and a group of students videotaped and observed a number of mediation sessions, some successful and others not. They also interviewed the mediators to find out what they thought of the sessions. Jeremy wrote up a report of the cases they had observed and later presented it at a convention.

It did not take long for Josh and Jeremy to realize that the Moral Majority and mediation studies had much in common. Both had to do with conflict and interaction between people with different ideas about the world. Certain mediation sessions seemed very much like the interactions they had observed between the Moral Majority and its critics, including the fact that they seemed intractable and did not get settled. The researchers began to explore some reasons why these types of conflict were so hard to settle and hypothesized that the opponents had such different views of the world that they had no common method for evaluating one another’s arguments or making a decision as to which side was right. They made a commitment to look into this problem in more detail.

Soon after Jeremy returned to California, he began to study the case of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the church. He saw this as an opportunity to gain additional insights into the problem of difficult, irresolvable conflicts. After interviewing several people involved in this conflict and examining the documents they had produced, he and some of his students wrote papers that were later presented at conventions. Jeremy had become so interested in this problem that he decided to take a semester’s leave from his university and return to Massachusetts to continue working on it with Josh.

When Jeremy arrived in the northeast, he found Josh busily working on a newly developed dispute intervention program at the university. This program was designed to help people understand and possibly solve the-kinds of difficult conflicts in which Jeremy and Josh had become interested. The program had sponsored public symposia on such topics as U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, animal rights, gay and lesbian rights, and CIA recruiting on campus. Jeremy immediately plunged in, became involved in the program’s committee, and sat in on a number of conflict sessions sponsored by the new program. He became reacquainted with Patricia Motley, an adjunct communication professor, who had become a leader in the dispute intervention program and had developed an interest in studying communication in conflict situations.

During this second stay in Massachusetts, Jeremy continued working on mediation and with a graduate student conducted a detailed study of a divorce mediation that shared many of the characteristics of the other conflicts Josh, Jeremy, and Patricia had studied. During this period, these three decided to codify what they had learned about conflict and write a paper on it.

They had come to call this kind of situation "moral conflict" because it seemed to involve deep differences in beliefs about right and wrong. They found that in moral conflicts, the "moral orders," or belief systems, of the disputants were "incommensurate," which means logically incompatible, and that their differences were therefore far deeper and more philosophical than the surface disagreement might suggest.

They also found that such conflicts often result in inept forms of discourse like shouting matches and slogans, which they came to call "reciprocated diatribe." They hypothesized that diatribe is a result of frustration caused by neither side understanding the other, and they felt that moral conflict was persistent and irresolvable because of the lack of a common set of standards for evaluating arguments. They found, however, that this type of harsh interaction could be overcome if parties were willing to share their deeper assumptions about reality in what they called "transcendent eloquence."

Now, several years later, these researchers have done several more case studies and are writing a book about their theory of moral conflict.
 

*from Littlejohn (1999)

Now that you have read the case, please answer the following questions:

1. How does this case illustrate theory development?
2. To what extent is the work of Jeremy, Josh and Patricia traditional social science?
3. What are the epistemological, ontological and axiological assumptions of this work?
4. What functions does the Sutra-Winters-Motley theory serve?
5. Evaluate the theory.