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For the Muslim faithful, the Islamic week indirectly derives from an act of “divine revelation” for the Prophet Muhammad that directs them to use Friday as a congregational day of prayer.⁷ The Koran is strict about this prescription and presents it as an obligation to the faithful. Verses 9 to 11 from chapter 62 provide the social context and religious meaning of the peak day of the Islamic week.⁸ 9. O you who believe, when the call is sounded for prayer on Friday, hasten to the remembrance of Allah and leave off traffic. That is better for you, if you know. 10. But when the prayer is ended, disperse abroad in the land and seek of Allah’s grace, and remember Allah much, that you may be successful. 11. And when they see merchandise or sport, they break away to it, and leave thee standing. Say: what is Allah is better than sport and merchandise. And Allah is the Best of Providers.The exegesis of verses 9 and 11 reveals or implies that the day of congregation is a work day and that Muslims, upon hearing the call for prayer, must leave all their earthly activities – commerce, sport, or any other – and attend the gathering (Juma’a) at the mosque. So work is permitted before the congregational prayer. Verse 10 also indicates that after prayer, one may return to work, confident that entrepreneurial activities may be successful because of the grace of Allah. Friday thus is parceled out in three distinct moments according to the Koran: the half-day’s work in the morning, the prayer time around noon, and the later half-day’s work in the afternoon. It is the only day of the week that is thus fractured.

Practicing Muslims pray five times a day during specified periods. Hence, public buildings in many Muslim-majority countries tend to have prayer facilities. These facilities are typically gender-segregated. Unfortunately, for a long time, the main focus for the design of these facilities has been on the male facilities. As a result, many female users suffer from using facilities that are not safe, hygienic or comfortable. Part of the reason is the lack of guidelines that help designers provide a facility that satisfies the needs of female users. This paper aims to address this problem with a focus on prayer facilities that are in public buildings and not in mosques.

The paper offers design guidelines that are based on interviews with female users, analysis of well-designed female prayer facilities, observations of users’ behavior, feedback from users on previously developed guidelines that are shared with male prayer facilities, and relevant religious rulings.

The guidelines address the location of the facility, the zoning and circulation and the design considerations for the prayer space, as well as the reception area and the ablution space. It also recommends a design for an ablution unit that better fits female users. Finally, the paper analyzes an existing design for a female prayer facility in a shopping mall and shows how a change in the design based on this paper’s recommended guidelines can achieve better safety, hygiene and comfort for female users.

The paper focus is new and should trigger the discussion on this aspect of facilities design where needed.

Executives are challenged every day to make important decisions that affect the performance of their business enterprises and, as a result, the success of their own careers. Based on that scenario, one cannot expect that only the rational approach works like a panacea for all managerial problems. This paper aims to propose that the best solution tends to embrace a complementary or integrated decision‐making approach.

The paper seeks to demonstrate that the convergence between rational and non‐rational decision‐making processes can be optimized by integrating several religious tenets.

The paper finds strong evidence that a religion‐based framework might enrich the sensitive topic of decision‐making processes in organizations.

Overall, the paper strives to show that intuition and prayer are two faces of the same coin, and argues that both forms of decision processes (e.g. rational and non‐rational analysis) might coexist perfectly in an integrative frame.

The article proposes prayer as a transcendent coping mechanism whereby executives might refine their intuition flux. As a result, it depicts a conceptual framework encapsulating all those constructs.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between religiosity based on the area with the number of self-employment in an area, i.e. city of Surakarta, Indonesia.

The researcher conducted a survey in 67 mosques in Surakarta, Indonesia, to capture religiosity level based on the area. Spearman correlation approach has been selected to investigate the relationship between religiosity and self-employment.

This study found that despite the female population being greater than male population in every district in Surakarta, on average, the number of female prayers were significantly less than male prayers either in Fajr or Maghrib prayer. In fact, the average number of Fajr prayers almost 50 per cent less than the average number of Maghrib prayers. Finally, the researcher found that the number of employees who work in the home industry is higher in the area that has a smaller gap on the number of Fajr and Maghrib prayers. Thus, the researcher might conclude that religiosity is positively associated with self-employment.

To best of researcher’s knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the relationship between religiosity level based on the area and self-employment. In addition, this study proposes a new methodology to measure Muslim’s religiosity. All in all, this study tries to untangle the conflicting evidence on the impact of religiosity on the self-employment.

The purpose of this paper is to report the perceptions of students taking the Master of Project Management Programme at the University of Botswana regarding their transformative experience called “prayer”. The term “prayer” was coined because of it being the first learning activity of the lecture; and at a conceptual level, to convey reverence towards the gift of learning. “Prayer” as a learning and teaching technique involves each student identifying material containing project management concepts or issues which they present to a class of peers using any appropriate means followed by discussion and peer assessment. The material presented may be an article from a newspaper or magazine. It may be a personal documented story or a story told around a picture, artefact, poster or video relating to a project management issue.

Students’ perceptions were obtained by means of a self-administered questionnaire containing open-ended questions. Content analysis was used to analyse the responses.

The results of the study indicated that “prayer” provided students ingredients of transformative learning. It also proved to be a worthwhile technique for inculcating some of the graduate attributes articulated by this university and for incorporating adult learning principles.

The technique can be used to compliment traditional techniques in teaching and learning in project management training. The limitations of the results are due to the self-reporting nature of the approach and the fact that the technique has been tried on one group.

There is a possibility that the technique can be extended to other disciplines such as business administration where students examine cases in the public domain to illustrate concepts learnt in class.

The originality lies in its packaging of a technique the think is worth sharing among project management educators. This is because the learning activity described engages students simultaneously in research, review, presentation, and communication as well as reflection, collaborative discourse and self and peer assessment.

With this paper we aimed to explore the matter of space as a physical expression of institutional logics. Following recent discussions on the role of materiality in organizational discourse, this study focused on spatial dimensions of institutional logics, namely, spatialized logics. Utilizing Lefebvre’s (1991) analytic distinction among three layers of space – conceived, lived, and perceived – we described the spatial expressions of distinct logics and the spatial relations among these logics. Drawing on a qualitative case study analysis of the world-renowned site of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, we argued that logics take form in space, logics get embodied in different layers of space, and matters of discursive commensurability and leakages also have spatial expressions. To exemplify these claims we undertook a qualitative case study analysis of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. The Wall is a 500-meter-long and two-millennia-old construction. We showed that, while in material and technical terms the Wall is a singular entity, three distinct logics occupy distinct sections along the Wall, and each of these logics reinterprets the materials and technicalities in distinct ways: religious, professional, and nationalistic. These three distinct spatialized logics get embodied in the conceived space (planning and policy of the site), perceived space (comments and opinions about the site), and lived space (behavior and social interaction at the site). Overall, by interjecting notions of materiality and space into the conversation about institutional logics, we demonstrated that in the physical layout of a space, logic cohesion, and interlogic commensurability literally become a “turf war.”

Modern life is characterized by its hectic life-style, which invariably leads to high levels of stress having negative consequences for the mind-body. Thus, people are seeking for natural ways to achieve a sense of equilibrium and peace. Neuroscience has identified beneficial findings from contemplative practices like meditation, prayers and fasting. Within the Islamic framework, these practices were found to be beneficial for both the body and the mind. However, comparatively little research has been carried out on Islamic contemplative practices. Thus, there is a dire need to carry out further research, where the focus needs to be more on the inward aspects of Islam especially the contemplative practices.

The study took an integrated approach, whereby, objective experimental data from various sources were combined with the religious narratives from the Qur’an and the Hadiths or the practice of the Prophet in Islam. This was augmented by the subjective experiences of the participants of the study and all of these woven to present a case for Islamic contemplative practices.

Worship, be it Yogic, Buddhist and Islamic, seems to have positive mental and physical benefits for individuals. Much has been documented within the field of Yoga and Buddhist practices, and it is only recently that Islamic practices are beginning to be studied and are yielding similar results. It has been found that Islamic ritual prayers, fasting and meditation (dhikr) have an impact on the well-being of the worshipper. The communities of practice commonly known as “tariqas” and other religio-spiritual orders can serve as a vehicle to further these practices. This opens the door for more extensive research in this direction.

This study clearly indicates that Islamic practices have positive benefits; however, the number of studies are limited. Moreover, there are a whole system of practices as the contemplative tree in this paper points out, which needs more robust as well as longitudinal studies to outline more conclusive evidence to this effect.

Muslims have been looking at other traditions like Yoga and Buddhist meditation to find ways of improving their physical and mental health. This meta-study indicates that Islamic contemplative practices have positive benefits, and thus, there are a variety of practices like ritual prayers, fasting and meditation, which is found to demonstrate positive health benefits. Thus, it has direct practical reasons to pursue these practices and derive the innate benefits from them.

The data from the various neuroscience studies have demonstrated the neurological and physiological impact on individuals directly relating to worship. However, the studies on the Islamic ritual prayer (salat) cited in this study points out to its social implications, where congregational prayers was found to be more beneficial than the individual prayers. Thus, this indicates the social implications that collective worship can have. Further research is needed in terms of understanding the social impact on the various collective contemplative practices.

The originality of this literature review and analysis is bringing together the various strands of neuroscience and health data to demonstrate the positive impact of worship emanating from others faiths, while building a case for Islamic contemplative practices. This is further augmented by its integrated approach of weaving hard and soft data and synthesizing it to present health benefits of worship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how digital innovation processes emerge and evolve in organizational settings, and how serendipitous and unbounded digital innovations affect organizations’ overall digital directions.

The authors draw on an interpretive case study of the Church of Sweden, tracing in detail the design, deployment and governance of an interactive website for digital prayer, the Prayer Web (PW).

The findings show how the site came about in a serendipitous manner, created by an advertising agency as part of a marketing campaign. In turn, the unbounded nature of digital innovation was revealed as the wide and rapid adoption of the PW raised issues concerning the church’s overall digital direction linked to centralized control, as well as the nature and role of pastors, prayer and communities, as the site allowed people to post prayers and spread their messages (initially with no moderation).

The authors explore the serendipitous and unbounded ways in which digital innovation emerged and evolved in a traditional organization with a long legacy as an important societal institution. The paper contributes by generating rich insights on the role of the distinct aspects of digital technology in serendipitous and unbounded digital innovation. It particularly highlights how the editability and reprogrammability of digital artifacts triggered unexpected new behaviors and governance requirements in the organization under study. The authors encourage further research into the interrelationship between multiple unbounded and serendipitous digital innovations in an organization over time.