Religious time in office hours: making the sacred commensurable

Abstract (English)

Modernist workplaces assumed a separation between work time and private time, with religion firmly ensconced in the realm of the latter (Jouili 2015; Strhan 2015). This separation has been challenged in recent years by global tech companies, who invite workers to “bring their whole self” to work, which in practice means that non-work activities are encouraged and sometimes even funded by workplaces (Chen 2022; Ecklund, Daniels, and Scheitle 2024). This blending of the private and public also has implications for the concept of work time, which in the current tech industry no longer represents the temporal divide between work time and personal time. Instead, tech workers will often decide when to work, and even from where to do their job, according to personal obligation rather than a strict work clock (Hacker forthcoming; Snyder 2016).
How does this combination of personal control over time and the renewed legitimation of religion shape religious time in the new tech workplace? I answer this question based on ethnographic work in a global tech company headquartered in Tel Aviv and interviews with observant Muslim and Jewish workers in the tech ecosystems of Toronto and Tel Aviv. As my interlocutors strive to adhere to daily rhythms of prayer, this paper examines the integration of their religious schedule with the new tech work time.
While anthropological discussions, following Durkheim, often portray religious time as a coherent overarching framework for group organization (Gell 1992; Munn 1992), this paper will highlight how religious workers integrate their religious temporal obligations into their work schedules. In practice, my interlocutors are examining and organizing their religious and work-related temporal obligations based on a unified and personally crafted calendar. I will use the idea of commensurability to discuss how sacred time and non-sacred time are being considered in the same realm (Espeland & Stevens 1998; Cohen 2018). In doing so, my paper will offer a case for religious time that goes beyond the closed-circuit notion of community, and reflects a religious time more adaptable to the individualistic and diverse social framework of the neoliberal labor market.