This article deals with intervention strategies, initiated by a third party, for social conflicts within organizations. An attempt is made to discover the extent to which a number of primary strategies, drawn from the literature, are used by internal and external organizational consultants in the day-to-day practice. Quantitative and qualitative material from 69 actual cases of third party intervention, distributed over different kinds of organizations and dealing with several types of conflict, is collected and analyzed. Two strategies (consultation and mediation) come clearly to the forefront: Consultation is split into two (sub)strategies, a confrontational and a procedural approach. A fourth approach is that of a "powerless and unsure third party."
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