Abstract
The paper explores Islamic morality within labor market realities. It presents Islamic moral axioms that are expected to guide employer–employee relationships. It provides an extensive review of Islamic moral ideals related to fairness in the labor market. Based on survey data from 319 individuals in the Saudi labor market, it tests three hypotheses related to religiosity, secular aspirations, and perception and practice of fairness in the labor market. Using multinomial logistic regression, the findings from several models clearly support all three hypotheses. They show that employers, owners and senior managers were more likely to consider market reality as their reference for describing fairness. Ideally speaking, the regression results confirm that being religious contributes positively to the sense of fairness even in a secular context. However, they also reveal that secular aspirations override religious ideals when it comes to market realities. In other words, when people place great importance on worldly outcomes, religious ideals have almost no impact on their labor market practices even if they ideally support fair practices. The study concludes that religious morality does matter with regard to fairness in employer–employee relationships only if it is not superseded by secular aspirations. Those who have a high-level of religiosity consider themselves to be fairer. However, if they embrace secular aspirations, they are less likely to practice their moral ideals in the labor market.
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Notes
For the word secular, we take definition provided by Mohammed Al-Attas. In his book on the Islamization of knowledge, he states that in the Arab world, secular is generally understood as “almaniy”. He argues that the term is first translated by Christian Arabs within their understanding of secularism. He claims that such translation is not proper from the Quranic perspective. He states that “if the nearest equivalent were to be found in Islamic to the concept secular, then it would be that which is connoted by the Quranic concept of al-hayyat al-dunya: the worldly life” (Al-Attas 1995, p. 21). In this article, by secular we mean worldly and by secular aspiration, we mean worldly aspiration.
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Acknowledgements
The initial findings of this study were presented at the SASE 28th Annual Meeting: Moral Economies, Economic Morality, University of California, Berkeley, June 24–26, 2016.
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Necati Aydin declares that he has no conflict of interest. Aljawhara Ibrahim Alquayid declares that she has no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Aydin, N., Alquayid, A.I. Market Reality Versus Religious Morality: Empirical Evidence from the Saudi Arabian Labor Market. J Bus Ethics 156, 679–698 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3559-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3559-6