The Three 'I's of Workplace Religious Accommodation for Muslims in Europe: Instrumental, Internal and Informal

The accommodation of Muslim religious practices is an increasingly salient political issue across Western Europe. Parallel to the increasing political importance of religious accommodation for Muslims, academic research on this subject also burgeoned. Nevertheless, most research has focussed on how states accommodate Muslim religious practices. The sociological literature focussing on workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices is still extremely scarce. Existing research addressing this topic is written by legal scholars (Alidadi et al., 2012) or from a management perspective (Lund Dean et al., 2015). The present paper fills this gap by presenting a qualitative scrutiny of 400 demands for religious accommodation in the workplace in Belgium.

The authors contend that turning the spotlights from state to workplace accommodation of Muslim’s religious practices allows discovering different answers to the how’s and the why’s of minority religious accommodation. Different than state accommodation of Muslim’s religious practices, which are often formally regulated and accompanied by an external and polarized public debate with opposing ideological argumentations, this article will show that workplace accommodation of Muslim’s religious practices presents different features. The empirical analysis demonstrates that workplace religious accommodation is characterized by 3 ‘i’s: it is granted or refused on the basis of instrumental argumentations, it is regulated informally and resolved internally. The article explains these specific features of workplace religious accommodation of Muslim religious practices by their fit with post-fordist features of the employment sphere in general, and by the neo-corporatist employment relations for Belgium in particular.