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ABSTRACT
The accommodation of Muslim religious practices is an increasingly salient political issue across Western Europe. Hitherto, most research has focused on how states accommodate Muslim religious practices, and sociological scholarship on workplace accommodation is still extremely scarce. This article fills the gap in the extant literature by presenting a qualitative analysis of over 300 requests for religious accommodation in the workplace in Belgium. The authors contend that turning the spotlight from state to workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices allows the discovery of different answers to the “hows” and the “whys” of minority religious accommodation. Different than state accommodation, workplace accommodation is characterized by three “i”s: it is granted or refused on the basis of instrumental argumentations; it is regulated informally and resolved internally. This article proposes an institutionalist framework adapted to the world of work to explain the specific features of workplace religious accommodation of Muslim religious practices.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Céline Teney, Souâd Hamdaoui, Andrew Crosby, Morgane Giladi, Lucie Martin, Merry Wafwana and Caroline Dauw, who all participated, in different capacities, to the research project and empirical research report on which this article is based. The paper also greatly benefited from the comments and the constructive feedback of the anonymous reviewers, of Karen Celis and the participants to the VUB Rhea seminar, Philip Barker and Fraser King. Thanks to all!
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The seventh “order of worth” (project) was added in later writings of Boltanski and Chiapello (Citation[1999] 2006).
2. The Religare project, as published in the International Journal of Discrimination and the Law (Bader, Alidadi, and Vermeulen Citation2013), is a socio-legal research which addresses the “perceptions of key political opinion makers” … “of the laws, judicial decisions and practices” regarding the “reasonable accommodation for religious beliefs and practices in the area of employment”. The research objective thus differs from ours, first by its focus on perceptions instead of concrete employer's responses, and second, by its inquiry of a wide variety of “key opinion makers”.
3. For an elaborate description of the methods, we refer to the original research report submitted to the funding institution (Adam and Rea Citation2014).
4. “Requests” for accommodation also include cases where Muslims do not explicitly demand authorization to practice religion at work, but just do so. The “accommodation cases” were identified by the contacted representatives of employers or trade unions. In the letters and e-mails addressed to them, we clearly stated that we are inquiring into how employers react to requests for accommodation of minority religious practices. While some interviewees were only confronted with one case, other could inform us on multiple cases.
5. By “public” we mean, public or publicly funded.
6. When using the term “employers”, we always refer to the broader category of representatives of employers or human resources personnel.
7. When using the term “employers”, we always refer to the broader category of representatives of employers or human resources personnel.
8. All subcategories are presented in the next section, which describes the research results.
9. For a detailed account on the differences and similarities per (e.g.) type of accommodation case, per sector, in Francophone Belgium and Flanders, we refer to the original research report submitted to the funding institution (Adam and Rea Citation2014).
10. For more information on differences regarding religious accommodation in Flanders and Francophone Belgium, see Adam and Torrekens (Citation2015).