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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between religion and entrepreneurship and whether religious practice impacts on how individuals view the individual and societal contribution of business enterprise. As ethnic diversity is increasing within the Western world, so too is the religious mix of value systems and religious belief systems that come with such diversity/religions. Paralleling increasing diversity is the decreasing participation rates in the traditional Christian churches. The paper questions the impact of this changing religious mix on entrepreneurial participation and perception.

A total of 2,000 randomly‐selected New Zealanders were telephone‐surveyed to measure their perceptions of individual and societal impacts of entrepreneurial participation and religious practice.

The findings indicate that increasing ethnic diversity and associated religious value systems are certainly not going to negatively reduce the business start‐up rate. If anything, the start‐up rate may be enhanced.

The paper shows that the value that New Zealand society places upon entrepreneurship is not diminished by the increasing religious diversity in the country.

Departing from the job demands resources model, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether religion, defined as strength of religious faith, can be viewed as resource or as demand. More specifically, the authors addressed the question as to how job insecurity and religion interact in predicting burnout and change-oriented behavior.

The authors conducted moderated structural equation modeling on survey data from a sample of 238 employees confronted with organizational change.

Results were largely consistent with the “religion as a demand” hypothesis: religion exacerbated rather than buffered the negative effects of job insecurity, so that the adverse impact of job insecurity was stronger for highly religious employees than for employees with low levels of religiousness. Religious employees appear to experience more strain when faced with the possibility of job loss.

The results of this study challenge and extend existing knowledge on the role of religion in coping with life stressors. The dominant view has been that religion is beneficial in coping with major stressors. The results of this study, however, suggest otherwise: religion had an exacerbating rather than a buffering effect on the relationship between job insecurity and outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to argues for theory development in Islamic marketing and attempts to lay the ground work by drawing on other social sciences.

This paper is based on a critical review of the literature for insights that advance Islamic marketing.

The study suggests that scholars in the area of Islamic marketing should start working towards the development of a theory of Islamic marketing. While this theory will draw on the unique engagement of Muslims with non-Muslims, it will offer an opportunity to explain and predict the world around us.

This is purely a theoretical piece that is aimed at knowledge development in the field, and, as such, it does not give much guidance to the practitioner, instead in invites other academics to draw on the world around us as they engage in their scholarly activities towards theory building.

The study gives directions for areas of possible future research in Islamic marketing.

Broadening the research efforts in Islamic marketing as advocated in this paper does have several important social implications.

This study is rare in terms of the issues it raises.

The institutional work literature has paid little attention to cognition and interests in the creation, maintenance, and disruption of institutions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the construct of interests as it relates to institutional work projects. The authors frame interests as recognitions situated within broader institutional meaning systems, with a specific focus on interest plurality.

The authors conducted an 18-month ethnography exploring institutional work projects within a rural chamber of commerce. The authors aimed to understand how projects contributed to community survival on a micro-level and institutional change on a macro-level. Rural chambers of commerce represent a unique example of emergent public-private partnerships, challenging traditional commercial logics of chambers of commerce. The research design included qualitative data collection, coding, and analysis of field notes, interviews, and archival sources.

Purposive action was grounded in the community inhabited by the rural chamber of commerce and not the institution itself. Recognized interests enabled nontraditional workers – public employees with newly founded and legitimate roles within the chamber – to pursue community-focussed projects. Change across the institution of chambers of commerce occurred because of the separated and aggregate projects spanning across rural communities.

Recognized interests are a social, plural, and malleable phenomenon supporting situated agency and the co-creation activities embodied in institutional work projects. The authors contribute to the institutional work literature by introducing the idea of interest plurality and illustrating how the work of rural chambers of commerce captures contemporary forms of community organizing.

In the extant literature, the concepts of charity and philanthropy have been differentiated based on the belief that charity stems from religious motivations and philanthropy is often secular in origin. Accordingly, this paper aims to investigate whether there is a distinction between managerial practices regarding the given concepts as emphasized in the conceptual discussions.

To see the managerial practices, the authors determined bazaars, community fundraising events organized by nonprofit organizations (NPOs), as the research field. Then, this study followed the general systematic of qualitative research. Accordingly, the authors conducted 44 interviews with experienced bazaar organizers from 10 NPOs in total. Furthermore, four days of participant observation with field notes were made in each bazaar, which lasted from 7 to 10 days. This study also used archival data as a secondary data source and then analyzed all data with a content analysis technique.

This study found that the field practices mainly do not support the distinction drawn over the conceptual discussions. Both concepts are nouns describing the act of giving and helping the needy. They are actively performed based on different motives (religion-based and secular).

The relevant distinction is limited to the conceptual discussions and has not been supported by the findings obtained from the field. Also, most of the studies on helping were carried out in the Western context. Studies conducted outside these cultures are quite limited. The value of the current study lies in the fact that it was conducted in a cultural context different from the Western cultures and paves the pathway for future research.

The study aims to establish that religiosity has a positive link with government trust, making the secularization trend all the more likely to further erode this already fragile resource.

Through the use of data from the World Values Survey and European Social Survey the link between religiosity and trust in government is examined.

Religiosity and trust in government are positively linked in aggregate data.

The analysis is based on aggregated data, not individual countries, and religiosity is a complex concept to measure.

Secularization will have a long-term negative effect on government trust. Low levels of trust in government in the West are likely here to stay, or even worsen, as populations continue to secularize.

With less trust in government, it will be more difficult to govern effectively.

The author has not yet seen a full test on how secularization will impact trust in government. In fact, this study makes clear that the trend goes a long way explaining why trust in government has been falling in the developed world for decades.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that national history plays an important role in formulations of workplace religious diversity strategies and practices. It builds on a discussion of the organization of religion in the workplace in two countries, namely, France and Lebanon.

This is a conceptual paper that provides an analysis into how national history plays an important role in formulations of workplace diversity strategies and practices.

The paper shows how religion has historically been organized and deployed in contemporary France and Lebanon by the same colonial power, albeit in different ways. While the workplace in France remains religiously neutral in the context of its national labor market, the colonial power has largely contributed to organized religion in contemporary organizations in Lebanon. In analyzing the Lebanese and French cases, it is argued that the use of religious diversity has weakened the process of adopting equal, diverse, and inclusive managerial strategies.

Experiences in both countries suggest a failure of “blind neutrality” in the case of France, and another failure of a form of positive discrimination in the case of Lebanon. The authors draw lessons from those two experiences and propose future directions of how policy makers/legislators and organizations can advance and capture more equal, diverse, and inclusive diversity strategies.

The above two cases offer rich lessons for religious diversity scholarship and practice. The paper contributes to the literature on diversity in the workplace by questioning the organization of religious diversity in two countries that are under researched in management and organization studies.

This study aims to provide a theoretical account of the nexus of religion and entrepreneurship in hospitality and tourism (H&T) by considering the influences of religion on entrepreneurial motivation, acquisition of resources for entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial behaviour.

The authors synthesise research and theory on religion and entrepreneurship and apply it within H&T, taking into account the specificities of the industry. Specifically, they pooled together relevant theory and empirical research findings which they summarised to identify points of convergence and divergence, before refining the data to allow for further theoretical insights to be gained.

The authors suggest that religion may positively or negatively influence entrepreneurship; in particular, they identify various modes of religion influences, which offer insights into how religion may encourage, sustain and amplify entrepreneurship or alternatively inhibit entrepreneurship.

Religion offers an important yet underused lens for understanding the activities and mechanisms influencing entrepreneurship in the rapidly evolving H&T industry. This study identifies different aspects of the two multidimensional and interdisciplinary concepts of religion and entrepreneurship and offers new insights into the relationship between the two within the context of H&T.

Spiritual tourism has recently been accepted as a growing segment of tourism in business and research circles. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a new dimension in Islamic marketing and investigates spiritual tourism as a new strategy for marketing Islam as a religion.

In this exploratory research, convenient sampling was employed to select Muslim spiritual tourists and Islamic organisations arranging spiritual tourism in Australia. A total of 34 face‐to‐face interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis was used to identify factors relevant to the research themes regarding spiritual tourism and marketing Islam.

Some religious organisations used religious gatherings and festivals as spiritual tourism products to market their religion – Islam. These organisations attracted Muslim and non‐Muslim spiritual tourists to the Islamic places, gatherings, occasions, and festivals by promoting them as spiritual tourism products.

The paper identifies spiritual tourism journeys and events that could be strategically used by religious organisations for marketing Islam.

This paper aims to build bridges for better understanding of Islam among the Australian public. The paper could be replicated to study the marketing of other religions in other geographical locations.

The paper originates in recognising a genuinely new strategy of spiritual tourism that could be used more effectively for marketing Islam. A future quantitative study could be conducted to test the findings of this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which Scottish pre-eminence in accounting texts in the eighteenth century was influenced by religion. By so doing, to add to the literature on the relationship between religion and accountability.

An examination of religion as social practice is conducted by examining the relationship between formal, printed, sources and the extensive archives of the Church of Scotland. A sample of five administrative units of the church is used to explore local practice in detail.

Accountability was at the heart of the theology of the Church of Scotland. It shaped local practices of accountability to give what is termed “systemic accountability”, which featured the detailed specification of roles and the recording of transactions. Lay involvement in this system was extensive amongst the “middling sort”. This system formed the backdrop to the Scottish pre-eminence in accounting texts, facilitated by widespread literacy and a propensity to publish, both in turn shaped by the broader religious context.

The research is confined to Scotland and does not consider the wider impact on areas such as British North America. The value of examining religion as a relationship between belief and social practice could be extended to other belief systems, as the paper only considers the Reformed Protestant tradition of Christianity.

The value is in a detailed investigation of religion as a social practice, which has not been presented before in the context of accountability. It presents a new perspective on Scottish accomplishments in the field of accounting, accomplishments which have been of significance for the broader profession.