Title of the Master’s Thesis: Negotiating Religious Identity in the Secular Workplace: Experiences of Czech Business Employees Affiliated with Protestant Churches

This thesis examines how employees affiliated with Protestant churches reflect on negotiating their religious identity in the secular workplace in the Czech business environment. In the Czech setting, where most of the population describes itself as non-religious, the topic remains empirically under-researched: existing reviews describe the links between religion and work in general terms rather than the conduct of individual employees in particular organisations. The aim is to understand that process from the actors’ own perspective. The study employs a qualitative design based on eight semi-structured in-depth interviews; all participants are men. The interviews were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis and interpreted through Jenkins’s dialectic of self-definition and categorisation. The analysis yielded three themes. The first shows that participants relate their conduct at work to God as an overriding standard of work done well, including where compliance cannot be detected or is disadvantageous; they also acknowledge that the same conduct may have a non-religious source. The second theme separates disclosing one’s faith from the extent to which it becomes known: most participants do not know who at work is aware of their faith, nor what meanings others attach to their conduct. The third theme challenges the assumption that religious difference in itself generates conflict with job demands, and shows that reactions participants merely anticipated also shape their conduct. Drawing on this material, the thesis refines Jenkins’s framework, in particular by distinguishing disclosure from the extent to which an identity becomes known, and by separating reactions reported by participants, uncertainty about categorisation, and anticipation of categorisation that never occurred. It raises practical questions concerning informal integration practices and the ways organisations learn about employees’ needs.