Professor Fiona Wilson, University of Glasgow, Great Britain

Fiona Wilson's main research interest is gender relations in organizations. She is author of "Organizational Behaviour and Gender" which covers many aspects of gender relations at work including motivation, leadership, perception, mentoring, sexual harassment and organizational romance. Recent research includes work on organizational romance and ESRC funded research on banks lending to male and female business owners.

Abstract Organizational Romance: Rules and Discourse, where 'Love Conquers All'
Despite the fact that Organization Studies has discussed resistance and the breaking of the rules, it has not touched on the inconsistency of espoused views and actual behaviour in the breaking of those rules. This paper does so, showing how meeting a sexual partner at work means "love" over-rides organizational rules that forbid romance.

We take seriously Weber's suggestion that sociologists "should suspend belief in systems of rationality in order to study them in culturally specific conditions" (Shenhav, 2003:192) by examining organizational romance and the practice of those rules in a work setting, through the analysis of the rhetoric of four bar managers taken from a corpus of 48 in-depth interviews.

Drawing on the theoretical tools of Pierre Bourdieu to help understand the importance of legitimacy and positioning to the discursive representation of participants, we examine the strategies employed within the discussion of rules and romance. The paper will describe some of the inconsistencies of utterance and action and the techniques used to justify and support their decisions.