Many studies have shown that urban workers may have a higher acceptance rate of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine uptake compared to their rural counterparts. As Omicron spreads globally, the COVID-19 booster vaccination has been acknowledged as the primary strategy against this variant. In this study, we identify factors related to the willingness of workers in megacities to take the vaccine booster shots and their main reasons accounting for their booster willingness. This research survey was conducted in megacity H in eastern China, and a total of 1227 employees from different industries were interviewed. The study at hand examines the relationship between various characteristics (including both economic and non-economic factors) of urban employees and their intention/desire to accept the COVID-19 booster shoots. The survey results show that some characteristics, namely work organization, vaccine knowledge, and social network, affect their intention to take COVID-19 vaccine booster shots. Urban employees with a strong work organization, a high degree of vaccine knowledge, and a dense social capital are more likely to receive booster injections than other employees. Therefore, work organization, vaccine knowledge, and social networks provide fundamental entry points for designing enhanced injection strategies to increase the acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines among employees in megacities.

Amidst the global religious resurgence in the post-secular world, the field of international relations finds itself unwilling or unable to situate religion back to theoretical paradigms subject to the Westphalian–Enlightenment prejudice. Advocates of religion’s theoretical and empirical significance often turn to religious soft power, a burgeoning theory that gradually becomes the anchorage of discussion but still suffers from conceptual ambiguity and limited explanatory capacity. This essay endeavors to fill in this lacuna by presenting the interdisciplinary attempt to integrate soft power in IR with the three dimensions of power in sociology, which results in a typology of performative, discursive, and relational dimensions of religious soft power. The explanatory and predictive capacity of this model is tested in the empirical case of the evangelical group’s influence on US foreign policy of the post 9/11 Global War on Terror. A process-level historical account based on archival sources furthers scholars’ knowledge of transnational religious actors’ ability to seize both systematic transformations at the international level and contentious dynamics in the domestic environment, which generates a reorientation in norms, identities, and values that contributes to the outcome of foreign policy, thereby answering the un-addressed question of how religion influences domestic and international politics. The bridging of IR, sociology, and historical sociology, three fields often intertwined, suggests a future direction for not only the religious return to IR but also the overcoming of the “intellectual autism” of this discipline, which needs to be better prepared for continuous challenges of soaring populism, nationalism, and clash of civilizations in the twenty-first century.

How does status dissatisfaction shape a state’s behavior? Existing literature suggests that mistreatment and misconception by the great powers could elicit a state’s revisionist conduct. Yet, this unidimensional understanding of international audiences fails to distinguish two distinct groups: those superiorly positioned above the state and those subordinately positioned below it on the status hierarchy. Focusing on two sources of status—recognition from above and deference from below—I propose a two-dimensional framework of multiple audiences dynamic that generates four ideal types of status scenarios. These include satisfaction (high recognition and high deference); unaccommodating elite group (low recognition and high deference); contestation from below (high recognition and low deference); and unaccommodating status quo (low recognition and low deference). I illustrate my framework by examining China’s shifting response to the emerging global environmental regime from 1950 to 1972. Beijing’s status concerns vis-à-vis the United States, the USSR, and the Third World countries induced it to change from initial embracement (1950–1952), challenge from within (1953–1955), persistent objection (1956–1970), to competitive participation (1971–1972) in the United Nations Conference on Human Environment (UNCHE).