Research

Religion at Work: A Theory of Organizational Inequality.  [1st author; with Makovi K., and Frimpong, J.A.]

Drawing on Status Characteristics Theory, we theorize that secularism operates as an organizational logic that stratifies workers by shaping ideal worker expectations. When religious practice becomes salient at work, religion functions as a diffuse status characteristic that activates cultural beliefs that devalue religious employees as ideal workers, producing structural workplace disadvantage. We test our theory using a pre-registered survey experiment of 2,528 U.S. managers. Respondents evaluated religious and nonreligious accommodation requests for identical organizational resources. Religious requests were consistently less likely to be approved than comparable nonreligious requests, and employees making religious requests were systematically evaluated less favorably as ideal workers compared to those making nonreligious requests. Experimental manipulations isolate religion as the causal mechanism and show that mentioning relevant anti-discrimination law does not eliminate the penalty. Causal mediation analyses exclude prejudice-based explanations and show that approximately one-third of the relationship between request type and approval operates through the devaluation of religious workers. Qualitative analyses further show that denials are primarily justified by appeals to the secular nature of the workplace. Overall, the evidence lends support to our theory and establishes religion, long marginalized in workplace inequality research, as an important axis of organizational inequality alongside race and gender.

Draft available upon request

1. Beyond Racism: Re-centering Religious Hostility in the Conceptualization of Islamophobia 

This paper challenges the prevailing Western framing of Islamophobia as primarily a form of racism. It argues that an overemphasis on a racial framing diminishes the significance of hostility toward Islam as a religion in our understanding of Islamophobia. Although anti-Muslim racism is undoubtedly an important facet of Islamophobia, empirical research shows that hostility toward Islam as a religion functions as a distinct yet interrelated phenomenon—an equally important dimension that existing scholarship either overlooks or treats as a relic of the past. To make the case for re-centering religious hostility in conceptualizations of Islamophobia, the paper begins with an overview and subsequent critique of the prevalent racism-centric approach. This critique identifies two key limitations. First, it highlights conceptual inadequacies in defining Islamophobia solely as racism, emphasizing that such a framework fails to adequately account for Islamophobia as anti-Islam bigotry and misrepresents the lived experiences of Muslims. Second, drawing on examples primarily from the United States but also from other Western contexts, it demonstrates how anti-Islam bigotry frequently manifests through explicitly theological or quasi-religious language, forms which cannot accurately be categorized as racism. Finally, the paper advances a revised definition of Islamophobia that re-centers hostility toward Islam qua Islam as a core dimension of the phenomenon. [Link]

+ Policy Impact: Research prompted outreach from Australia’s first Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia (appointed by the Australian Prime Minister), leading to ongoing discussions on research-policy collaboration. He also designated the article as required reading for his team.

2. Faith Over Symbolism: Deconstructing Political Narratives of the Hijab  [2nd author; with Abdelhadi, E.]

This paper critically examines the prevalent sociopolitical narrative that frames the hijab in Western societies as a political symbol rather than a manifestation of religious devotion. Utilizing quantitative methods to analyze large-scale survey data, the study explores the motivations behind hijab adoption among Muslim women in the United States. The findings challenge dominant discourses that reduce the hijab to a form of political resistance or identity signaling. Instead, the data reveal that for many Muslim women, wearing the hijab is an expression of religious commitment and personal piety. The study underscores the importance of re-centering Muslim women's voices in sociological analyses of religious—particularly Islamic—practices, and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the hijab beyond politicized interpretations. [Data analysis]

1. French Islamophobia: How Orthopraxy Is Conceptualized as a Public Peril [Equal contribution with Lienen, C.] 

For over two decades, France’s Muslim population has faced a series of legal measures and hostile public narratives aimed at problematizing their faith. Notable examples include the 2004 national ban on “ostentatious religious symbols” in state schools, which prohibits obligatory religious dress in various settings. These individual instances are compounded by more recent broader policies, decisions, laws, and executive statements that negatively impact Muslim life. This paper examines France’s trajectory from a new perspective: A Muslim legal viewpoint. It argues that the French approach constitutes a two-step process of institutionalized Islamophobia, understood here as hostility towards Islam as a faith. First, the state redefines mainstream Islamic orthopraxy as “extreme”, pitting ordinary religious practices against averred Republican values. Second, it seeks to promote an alternative concept of a “French Islam”—one that aligns with France’s secular principles and is stripped of its religious essence—positioning it as the only acceptable framework for Muslims to practice their faith in France. We argue that this process is not about upholding laïcité or state neutrality; rather, invoking the latter serves as a smokescreen for the state’s Islamophobia. [Link]

2. Islamophobia: The Discursive Apparatus of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, Palestine.

This paper analyzes the ideological function of Islamophobia in contemporary structures of genocidal violence, focusing on Israel’s attack on Gaza that began in October 2023. Drawing on scholarship framing Islamophobia as a structural feature of Western imperial formations, the article argues that Islamophobic discourse serves as the discursive apparatus through which Israel’s genocide is rendered legible. Analyzing political speeches and official statements by Israeli and U.S. political leaders, as well as major media narratives, the paper demonstrates how three central Islamophobic tropes—depicting Muslims as licentious, inherently barbaric, and pathologically anti-Semitic—are mobilized to rationalize Palestinian dispossession and mass killing. Overall, the paper argues that Islamophobia operates as part of a broader ideological strategy that not only enables genocide but also forecloses political legibility of Palestinian violence as an anti-colonial struggle by reframing it as a pathological expression of fanatical religious anti-Jewish hatred. In this way, scrutiny of Israeli actions is cast as morally suspect, narrowing the scope of legitimate critique, while also enabling the territorial objectives of Israel’s settler-colonial project. [Link]

1. Does the Muslim penalty in the British labour market dissipate after accounting for so-called ‘sociocultural attitudes’? 

Using multilevel modelling, this paper investigates ethno-religious penalties in unemployment and inactivity among men and women using the Understanding Society survey. The paper confirms previous findings of a Muslim penalty and a British labour market hierarchized by colour (ethnicity) and religion (culture). However, by including a greater range of ethnic groups the paper provides a corrective to accounts in the sociological literature that being White is not a protection against the Muslim penalty. Rather, while affiliation with the Muslim White British group does not appear to be associated with penalization, Muslim Arabs who traditionally identify as White are found to experience significant disadvantage. This suggests that the Muslim penalty might also be moderated by a person’s country of origin. The paper also finds that considerable penalties remain for Muslims even after adjusting for so-called “sociocultural attitudes”, challenging the assumption that value orientations offer a suitable explanation for the Muslim penalty. [Link]

+ Media Impact: The Guardian, The National, Arab News, Morocco World News, Daily Sabah, Islam Channel, The Mirage, University of Bristol press release, ‘Read of the Day’ in The Bridge Initiative newsletter (Georgetown University), Muslim Women Network, and an in-depth television interview on Islam Channel.

2. A Job, But Not Necessarily a Good One: The Job Quality Penalty of Muslim Women in Britain [1st author; with Cheung, S. Y.]

This study examines job quality disparities among Muslim women in Britain, addressing a critical gap in the Muslim penalty literature by incorporating job quality as an axis of labor market inequality. Drawing on pooled data from 12 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study, we construct a multidimensional job quality index using exploratory factor analysis of 21 indicators encompassing both pay- and non-pay-related job attributes. Employing multilevel linear modeling, we control for key demographic, ethnic, and employment characteristics. Our findings reveal a robust Muslim penalty in job quality: Muslim women report significantly lower job quality scores compared to their Christian counterparts. This disadvantage is most pronounced in routine occupations. Similar negative effects are observed in intermediate roles; however, these differences do not reach statistical significance possibly due to sample size limitation. In managerial and professional roles, disparities are less pronounced and likewise not statistically significant. By furthering our understanding of the Muslim penalty in Britain, this study contributes to a more nuanced comprehension of religious stratification in Western labor markets, with implications that extend to other contexts where Muslim women, as a marginalized minority, face some of the most severe employment disadvantage.  [Working paper]

1. Who Speaks Up? Race-Gender Inequalities in the Disclosure of Workplace Bullying [1st author; with Makovi K., Shepherd H., and Frimpong, J.A.] 

Workplace bullying, affecting approximately 10–15% of employees globally, imposes serious personal and organizational costs. While much research focuses on the incidence of bullying, this study investigates a critical yet underexplored response: disclosure. Using a survey experiment involving 4,413 U.S. employees, we examine the conditions under which individuals disclose bullying and how workplace context, including information transmission and organizational culture, shapes this decision. Findings reveal that disclosure decisions are not significantly influenced by the manipulated characteristics of the aggressor or confidante. Instead, disclosure is strongly patterned by the respondent’s own race and gender. White men are most likely to disclose, while Black women are least likely—highlighting how perceived risks and benefits of disclosure are unequally distributed. Organizational context matters: formal policies and supportive environments increase likelihood of disclosure for some groups, but do not eliminate race-gender disparities. This research underscores the importance of both individual-level identities and organizational conditions in shaping responses to workplace bullying. Findings have implications for designing more inclusive and effective reporting systems that encourage disclosure across diverse employee populations. [Working paper]

1. An Experimental Study of Employer Attitudes towards Religious Accommodation Requests in the United States and France. [1st author; with Makovi K., and Frimpong, J.A.]

This study examines whether managerial bias toward religious accommodation requests reflects a general aversion to religion or a specific bias against Islam. Using an original between-person experimental vignette design, we present U.S. and French managers with identical workplace scenarios in which a male employee requests time off for a religious holiday. The religious affiliation varies across three conditions, allowing us to assess responses across multiple faiths. By holding all other variables constant, the study isolates the effect of religious identity on managerial decision-making. This research contributes to scholarship on religious discrimination, the Muslim penalty, and secularism by clarifying whether Islam triggers uniquely exclusionary responses or whether such reactions reflect a broader pattern of religious aversion. The findings have implications for employment policy, organizational diversity practices, and theories of inclusion in Western democracies. [Data Collection, 2nd round]