International Sociology

This article explores how visual approaches to globalization as expressed and enacted in everyday life may enrich and complement the more abstract and mainly quantitatively supported discourses around this convoluted phenomenon. Visual methods, with their focus on empirically observable aspects of culture, indeed have the capacity to uncover forms of global interconnectivity in urban settings, by looking carefully at the material environment and artifacts as cultural expressions and at visual practices and performances of people within those spaces. Observing globalization in urban public space involves a wide variety of resources, methods, techniques and technologies, each with their specific affordances and limitations. Therefore this contribution is less a detailed study about globalization than it is about how to study aspects of globalization through its visual dimensions and by using visual means and methods to capture data and to communicate insight in novel ways.

Although it is widely held that working conditions in the informal economy are worse than in the formal economy, little evidence has been so far provided. The aim of this article is to fill this lacuna by comparing the working conditions of informal employees with formal employees using the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey. Multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression analysis provides a nuanced and variegated appreciation of which working conditions are worse for informal employees, which are no different, and which are better for informal than formal employees. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical and policy implications.

The differences in the socio-economic outcomes of majorities and minorities have been well studied in sociology. This article breaks new ground by investigating the effect on religiosity of majority/minority status in two Muslim-majority and two Muslim-minority countries of South and Southeast Asia. Religiosity is conceptualised as a multidimensional phenomenon. The article critically discusses this conceptualisation through an analysis of survey data. The findings show significant differences in the sociological profiles of religiosity in Muslim-majority and Muslim-minority countries. The architecture of religiosity is significantly more orthodox in Muslim-majority countries. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for understanding the nature and dynamics of religious orthodoxy, the nature of civil society, religious reform and the role of collective religious social movements.

To explore how people attribute meanings to climate change in Taiwan, this study applied social representations theory (SRT) to develop a self-report semi-structured questionnaire that was used to collect data. To fill a research gap, structural equation modeling (SEM) was adopted to examine the determinants of social representation factors that may affect the public’s intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). Exploratory factor analysis results obtained from 180 valid online responses indicated four factors for social representations of climate change, namely Emerging Climate Change Risk, Media Coverage and Influence, Psychological Distance, and Pro-environmental Behavior Intentions. The results of SEM analysis obtained from the total of 245 valid online and paper-and-pencil responses revealed that Emerging Climate Change Risk and Media Coverage and Influence helped explain the public’s PEBs intentions, but Psychological Distance did not. This exploratory study provides preliminary knowledge of public understanding of and response toward climate change in the Taiwanese society and demonstrates a novel application of SEM analysis to test the direct effects of social representations of climate change on PEB intentions.

This study examines the changes in the effects of income, education, and urban/rural residency on the risk of obesity within the Chinese society in recent years. Using pooled data from five waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) between 2010 and 2015, it reveals significant shifts in the distribution of the obese population within the Chinese society. China is now at a critical point in the transition with respect to obesity. The positive income–obesity relationship is about to turn negative; the obesity-depressing effect of education continues to increase; and the urban–rural gap in obesity is soon to disappear and reverse. Consequently, individuals with lower income or less education and rural residents face increasingly higher risks of obesity over time. The distribution of obesity in today’s Chinese society increasingly mirrors and may aggravate existing social inequalities.