Accommodation

In one line

Accommodation is the process by which people who are in conflict stop fighting and arrange to live with one another, without their differences being resolved.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: accommodation is the associative social process by which persons or groups in conflict adjust to one another so as to overcome the conflict and resume working relations, without the underlying differences necessarily being removed. MacIver and Page describe it as the process in which man attains a sense of harmony with his environment. Park and Burgess treat it as the natural sequel to conflict, and the stage at which a modus vivendi is reached.

The key idea: the difference remains

This is the point that distinguishes accommodation from assimilation and is the commonest place to lose marks.

Accommodation stops the fighting. It does not change anybody's mind. Two communities that reach an accommodation still hold their different beliefs, still prefer their own practices, and may still dislike each other. What has changed is that they have arrangements under which they can live and work in the same place.

Assimilation, by contrast, removes the difference itself. Accommodation is an arrangement; assimilation is a fusion. Accommodation can be reached in an afternoon; assimilation takes generations.

Its characteristics

1. It follows conflict, and exists to terminate it.
2. It is universal and continuous, since every society is full of arrangements of this kind.
3. It may be conscious and deliberate, as in a negotiated settlement, or unconscious, as when a child accommodates to family rules without anyone deciding anything.
4. The differences persist.
5. It restores functioning, allowing cooperation to resume.
6. It is often unequal. An accommodation may simply register that one party is stronger, which is the point made in the criticism below.
7. It is not necessarily permanent, and may break down into renewed conflict.

The forms of accommodation

This is what an examiner asks for, and each form should carry its own sentence.

Coercion. Accommodation imposed by the stronger party by force or the threat of it. The conflict ends because one side cannot continue. Conquest, and the settlement that follows a defeat.

Compromise. Each party gives up part of its claim. It requires that the parties be of roughly comparable strength, since a party who can win entirely has no reason to concede. Treated with tolerance in the next chapter.

Arbitration and conciliation. A third party is brought in. In arbitration the third party decides and the parties are bound; in conciliation the third party helps them reach their own agreement and decides nothing. Mediation is the term now generally used for the second. Adjudication is the same idea in its state form: a court decides.