DISPUTE DOMAINS - ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXTS AND DISPUTE PROCESSING

This article describes how organizational disputes emerge within, and are shaped by, dispute domains. We analyze dispute domains as the fundamental assumptions, vocabularies, orientations, concerns, and constraints that circumscribe conflictual interaction in particular organizational settings. Organizational disputes are transformed as they move from one dispute domain to another. We examine such dispute transformations in the context of staff-client dispute processing in a welfare-to-work program, and conclude by discussing the implications for analyzing organizations as interrelated dispute domains.