Issues with Romance in the Workplace Environment

Due to the increased interaction between coworkers on a daily basis, studies show there is a direct correlation with romance that stems from the workplace. While there can be benefits, this paper will show how romances in the workplace can result in negative effects on the workplace environments through a multitude of ways. Workplace Romances deal with issues originating from hierarchal relationships, including sexual harassment and favouritism, which further impacts job productivity and morale. The existence of these forms of relationships may be unavoidable, yet they can also be damaging to a company when relationships become unsuccessful. Workplace Romances can have a major effect on coworkers, including tension and conflict. Workplace policies are a divided subject, as they could perhaps prevent issues, while at the same time, they may create further issues.

A View from Europe

The history of sociology can be likened to the history of the Habsburg Empire, which claimed to have legitimate sovereignty over the whole of Europe but eventually became a discontented jumble of margins. In the same way, Talcott Parsons tried to claim that sociology was the empress of the social sciences; economics, political science, and the others being allocated their places within its realm. But sociology could not match the tougher, tighter theoretical structures of political science, economics, psychology, and even possibly anthropology. It became an internally divided subject, cultivating the margins. There is a field called neo-institutionalism in which an increasing amount of good research is being done and which is challenging some of the orthodoxies of the neo-classical economics and neo-liberal political science which have come to dominate the intellectual world since the decline of Keynesianism in the 1970s.