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This paper describes a study of factors that have influenced the career development of senior managers in local government. It extends earlier work on business chief executives and chief officers of police carried out by Margerison and Kakabadse. It was found that the influences could be categorized into three main groups: two kinds of personal attributes – ability factors, motivational factors – and the third group comprising situational factors. Certain of the individual factors are consistent with the findings from competency research. While there are some differences from the earlier research the extent of the similarity is more striking, suggesting the enduring importance of many influencing factors across both time and employment sector.

Research illustrates that workplace romance is on the rise and has potentially negative and beneficial consequences. The purpose of this paper is to understand, from an individual manager and employee perspective in the UK and USA, what personal experience individuals had on workplace romance and what this meant to them personally and in terms of company policy.

A thematic analysis approach was taken to understand what experiences individuals had on workplace romance and how this experience should be reflected in company policy. The research utilised qualitative interviews which were preferred over other methods, such as focus groups by the participants. These interviews were recorded, transcribed and coded to formulate themes in the research.

The sample consists of 21 employees and 15 managers from Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania and England. Regardless of whether participants were from the USA or England, their opinions were similar. Managers and entry level employees feel that workplace romance was acceptable if it has minimal impact on the workplace. Managers and entry level employees are most concerned with the negative impacts of workplace romance on the atmosphere of the workplace, more so than the risk of sexual harassment lawsuits. Managers and entry level employees agree on the importance of companies having a policy on how workplace romance will be handled.

Both managers and employees stress that company policy should not place a complete ban on workplace romance; that workplace romances should be handled on a case by case basis.

The paper adds to existing research by comparing managers' and entry level employees' perceptions of consensual romantic relationships between people who work for the same organisation.

The #MeToo movement has brought questions of sexuality and power in the workplace to the forefront. The purpose of this paper is to review the research on hierarchial consensual workplace romances and sexual harassment examining the underlying mechanisms of power relations. It concludes with a call to action for organizational leaders to adopt fair consensual workplace romance policies alongside strong sexual harassment policies.

This paper represents a conceptual review of the literature on consensual workplace romance, sexual harassment, passive leadership and power relations. Passive leadership leads to a climate of incivility that in turn suppresses disclosures of sexual harassment (Lee, 2016). Consensual workplace romances across hierarchical power relations carry significant risks and may turn into harassment should the romance turn sour.

Two new concepts, sexual hubris and sexploitation, are defined in this paper. Sexual hubris, defined as an opportunistic mindset that allows the powerful to abuse their power to acquire sexual liaisons, and its opposite, sexploitation, defined as a lower-status member using sexuality to gain advantage and favor from an upper-level power target, are dual opportunistic outcomes of an imbalanced power relation. Sexual hubris may increase the likelihood for sexual harassment such that a mindset occurs on the part of the dominant coalition that results in feelings of entitlement. Sexploitation is a micromanipulation tactic designed to create sexual favoritism that excludes others from the power relation.

Sexual hubris and sexploitation are conceptualized as an opportunistic mechanisms associated with imbalanced power relations to spur future research to tease out complex issues of gender, sexuality and hierarchy in the workplace. Sexual hubris serves to protect the dominant coalition and shapes organizational norms of a climate of oppression and incivility. Conversely, sexploitation is a micromanipulation tactic that allows a lower-status member to receive favoritism from a higher-power target. Four research propositions on sexual hubris and sexploitation are presented for future scholarship.

Most organizational leaders believe consensual romance in the office cannot be legislated owing to privacy concerns. Passive leadership is discussed as a leadership style that looks the other way and does not intervene, leading to workplace hostility and incivility (Lee, 2016). Inadequate leadership creates a climate of passivity that in turn silences victims. Policies concerning consensual workplace romance should stand alongside sexual harassment policies regardless of privacy concerns.

The #MeToo movement has allowed victims to disclose sexual misconduct and abuse in the workplace. However, the prevalence of sexual harassment claims most often can be traced to a leadership problem. Employers must recognize that sexual hubris and sexploitation arise from imbalances of power, where sex can be traded for advancement, and that often consensual workplace romances end badly, leading to claims of sexual harassment. Consensual romance policies must stand alongside sexual harassment policies.

Sexual hubris and sexploitation are offered as novel concepts that provide a mechanism for conceptualizing the potential for abuse and manipulation from unbalanced power relations. These are original concepts derived from the arguments within this paper that help make the case for consensual workplace romance policies alongside sexual harassment policies.

This paper argues that extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce “natural” hazards and also the human conditions that produce vulnerability, which combined create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is then built into the current global socio-economic system, as an integral component not accidental by-product.

As part of the movement to liberate disasters as discipline, practice and field of enquiry, this paper does not talk disasters per se, but rather its focus is on “extractivism” as a fundamental explanator for the anthropogenic disaster landscape that now confronts us.

Applying a gender lens to extractivism as it relates to disaster, further highlights that Disaster Risk Management rather than alleviating, creates the problems it seeks to solve, suggesting the need to liberate gender from Disaster Risk Management, and the need to liberate us all from the notion of managing disasters. Since to ‘manage’ disaster risk is to accept uncritically the structures and systems that create that risk, then if we truly want to address disasters, our focus needs to be on the extractive practices, not the disastrous outcomes.

The fundamental argument is that through privileging the notion of “disaster” we create it, bring it into existence, as something that exists in and of itself, apart from wider socio-economic structures and systems of extraction and exploitation, rather than recognising it for what it is, an outcome/end product of those wider structures and systems. Our focus on disaster is then misplaced, and perhaps what disaster studies needs to be liberated from, is itself.