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This article addresses religious tolerance for Sabbath‐keepers in the hospitality industry. The authors approach this issue by assessing the perception of managers in the Jamaican tourism industry on this topic. A major finding was that managers are reluctant to employ persons who have a strong desire to observe the Sabbath. The researchers also discovered that the law does not provide specific provisions to protect the rights of Sabbath‐keepers. Managers are, however, willing to make arrangements to facilitate these individuals whenever possible. This augurs well for students of hospitality management who desire to observe the Sabbath. More research on this topic is needed since this study is by no means exhaustive.

Focusing on Sanitarium, a commercial‐charity operating as a department of a church, the paper aims to use Mashaw's taxonomy to examine this organisation's informal reporting in the context of accountability.

The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on data gathered from primary and secondary archival sources, interviews with key informants, and reports in the public media.

The paper examines Sanitarium, a hybrid organisation that has made informal account giving its primary means of reporting to constituents and the general public. It reveals that while the informal reporting blurs the boundaries of reporting regimes, the informal account always discloses something more, has the spirit of accountability and provides insight into the organisation that otherwise would not be accessible. The paper shows the usefulness of applying Mashaw's framework to examine the accountability practices of organisations in the third sector.

The paper extends understanding into the nature of accountability by highlighting the contribution of informal account giving, the role of stakeholder perceptions in determining what counts as accountability, and the benefits of using a framework that can be applied to all commercial organisations, including faith organisations. The paper focuses on an area of study that has been acknowledged as under‐researched and contributes to the knowledge of accountability in religious organisations.

This paper is the outcome of an empirical research on a Seventh-day Adventist farm in Tanzania. The author investigated the role of Christian spirituality in switching to and maintaining vegetarian practices. Dietary change is proposed in the sustainability literature as a crucial trajectory to mitigate the impacts of climate change. The purpose of this paper is to explore the links between spirituality and climate-friendly dining in a localised Christian context and discuss their significance further for wider society.

Social practice theory (SPT) provided the tools to explore, empirically, the dynamic development of dietary practice within the farm community and its relation to the outside world; according to SPT, following the main building blocks of practices, namely materials, competences and meanings (cognitive or emotional), helps to understand the evolution of practices in society.

Findings show that the spiritual element of the community's dietary practice is key in maintaining commitment to vegetarianism, despite the rationale focussing exclusively on human health.

Expanding the rationale to animal compassion and environmental concerns could enhance the stabilisation of the practice within and beyond the community's realms.

The research showcases, probably for the first time, how a localised vegetarian practice may be linked to broader societal developments and policymaking through the application of SPT.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it describes the nature of internal controls (IC) in Christian and Hindu religious organizations (ROs) in Trinidad and Tobago. Second, the paper provides an assessment of the relative comprehensiveness of IC among the ROs examined and offers tentative explanations for the findings. Most of the information used in the paper was collected by conducting structured interviews with the chief financial officer(s) of each RO. This information was supplemented by published studies. The findings indicate that the ROs as a group have inadequate and patchy IC systems. Conversely, all the ROs examined had implemented many of the basic foundational elements of an effective IC system. This suggests that they could significantly improve the quality of their IC systems by instituting some fairly minor and cheap practices. The implications of these findings for administrators and researchers of ROs are discussed.

Warren S. Stone, President of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, when asked, at the height of the anti‐union open shop movement of the 1920s, what labor thought of the churches, said “…labour does not think very much of Iabor.”

This paper aims to investigate the practice of accounting in the Seventh-day Adventist church of the Pacific Islands and pays particular attention to the coexisting of two control devices: accounting and religion.

This paper implemented a qualitative field study design collecting interview data from church members from the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Fiji. Data were also collected through focus group discussions, document reviews, website analysis and participant observations. Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking on symbolic violence, doxa and capital are used to interpret the findings.

This paper’s main contribution shows that while there is a divine and profane divide, social agents, given their agency, can move back and forth from one side of the divide to the other. Accounting as a control device does not include features such as faith, which is helpful for decision-making; accordingly, religion is relied upon when it comes to decision-making. In contrast, accounting has features that are useful for stewardship purposes. Accordingly, when it comes to the church’s stewardship function accounting in the form of financial reports is relied upon.

Pacific Island culture almost permeates all facets of life, including church life; however, this study did not clarify this. Later studies can explore the implications of culture on the deployment of accounting in a religious setting.

This rich empirical study describes the control dynamics and the tension between accounting and religion in a religious organisation. Accounting needs to adapt to churches’ unique characteristics, whereby religious/doctrinal beliefs must be accounted for and respected. Unlike in the corporate world, accountants in churches cannot fully practice their training or exercise the kind of influence they usually hold in organisations due to their religious belief systems.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of a few studies on the religion-accounting relationship. While the focus of earlier studies was generally on a secular and sacred divide, this study looks at coexisting of accounting and religion. This study adds to the sparse literature on accounting and religion and their controlling influence.

There has been a recent tendency for medical sociology to ignore the possible influence that religion may have on health. For example, religion as a social variable is now no longer routinely collected in large scale social surveys dealing with health or mortality. As Vaux speaking of America stated: “The U.S. Public Health Service, in its extensive and comprehensive analysis of health in its etiological and epidemiological dimensions, has chosen to systematically ignore the variable religion” (1,p.524). Such an attitude has been justified by recourse to arguments about the secularisation of society and in particular to the decline in the membership of the traditional churches. In this article I wish to re‐open this area for discussion by again asking the question: does religion influence health? The medical literature, from both national and ad hoc studies, considering the evidence of health effects under the headings of mortality, and physical and psychological morbidity will be reviewed. Religion however, when dealt with as a social science variable does have its problems; if correlations between religion and health are found how are they to be accounted for? I will, therefore, also look at the various types of causal mechanisms which have been put forward by researchers. Further, why certain diseases have greater prominence in the literature than others, and why certain religious groups have received greater attention than others will be considered. Finally the article concludes by outlining avenues of future research in the area and how any such work could avoid the theoretical bias of past studies.

Religion could drive development. Although Ghana is touted as the most religious country in the world, notably, some Charismatic/Pentecostal churches operate at the expense of community development and members’ welfare. This study sought to achieve three objectives: to determine whether there is an opportunity for organizing the various churches for interfaith cooperative collective action; to assess the association between people’s religiosity and the propensity to join interfaith cooperative collective action and to assess people’s perceptions of the institutional framework that could facilitate the organization of the religious community in Ghana for interfaith collective action.

Descriptive statistics and an ordered probit model (OPM) were used to analyze cross-sectional data from a representative sample of households in the Greater Accra Region. Thematic analysis was also used to analyze the qualitative data.

The study found that generally, there is a positive response to a proposal to mobilize churches in an interfaith cooperative collective action, but distrust poses a great threat to interfaith cooperative collective action. The study also found that affiliation with the Seventh-Day Adventist Church and Pentecostal/Charismatic is negatively (positively) associated with the propensity to join a collective action, respectively. Finally, the results of the study found that accountability, proper management and fair distribution of the proceeds from a collective action will help in mobilizing churches in Ghana in an interfaith collective action.

This is the first major study to explore the possibility of interfaith collective action among religious denominations aimed at accelerating poverty reduction and wealth creation in any developing country.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2023-0670