Configuring the Third Space: Perceptions of Religious Accommodation in Offshore Service Centers

Abstract

Every religion requires its participants to engage in certain patterns of behavior, and managers have to deal with religious employees' demands to accommodate these behaviors. This study focuses on the sensitive nexus where religion and demands of the global market intersect--and potentially challenge cross-national business practices--by examining strategies for accommodating religious requests in four Tunisian call centers that provide services to European clients. Our data and analysis, based on semi-structured interviews and non-participatory observation, focus on employees’ perceptions of management policies and practices related to religion, policies that are often designed to mask employees’ actual identities as non-European Muslims. Our analysis draws on Identity Regulation Theory (IRT), inasmuch as our data reveal that religious expression is a key element of many employees’ indigenous identities, and on the postcolonial theory of the “third space” to capture the power dynamics at play in the interactions between employees embedded in a former colony and European clients embedded in societies that colonized Tunisia and much of Africa. Using a qualitative, comparative case-study approach, we describe and compare a variety of religion-related strategies used by managements of the four call centers and the kinds of resistance to those strategies that employees deploy in order to assert their religious identities.