Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts

Multi-paradigmatic Perspectives

Nilanjana Bardhan, C. Kay Weaver, Nilanjana Bardhan, C. Kay Weaver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781135236823
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

While public relations practice has become increasingly globalized, scholars are still behind in theorizing about the intersections of culture, communication, and power at this level of practice. This volume emphasizes theories and concepts that highlight global interconnectedness through a range of interpretative and critical approaches to understanding the global significance and impacts of public relations.

Providing a critical examination of public relations' contribution to globalization and international power relations, the chapters included here explore alternative paradigms, most notably interpretive and critical perspectives informed by qualitative research. The volume encourages alternative 'ways of knowing' that overcome the shortcomings of positivist epistemologies. The editors include multiple paradigmatic approaches for a more complex understanding of the subject matter, making a valuable contribution toward widening the philosophical scope of public relations scholarship.

This book will serve well as a core text in classes in international public relations, global public relations, and advanced strategic public relations. Students as well as practitioners of public relations will benefit from reading the perspectives included here.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts

Nilanjana Bardhan and C. Kay Weaver

If we are to attempt to understand the world in the new century, we cannot but come to grips with the concept of globalization.

(Appelbaum & Robinson, 2005, p. xi)

Globalization has not only increased the importance of “global” public relations but has also provided the opportunity for introspection and selfcritique about the practice and scholarship.

(Sriramesh, 2009a, p. 9)

We hear it everywhere. It is a prominent refrain in the discourse of public relations practitioners and scholars. Public relations has gone global. But what does “global public relations” mean in the life world of our field, and what are the implications of globalization for public relations scholarship and practice? The last two decades have radically changed the way people, organizations, and systems communicate and operate across national and cultural borders. While old ways of theorizing about the functions and sociocultural role of public relations are inadequate for conceptualizing new globalizing realities, they are not completely erased either. In other words, we are at an in-between point in our thinking about these matters. Questions related to globalization cannot be theorized by simply reusing dated frames of thinking, and yet, partly as a consequence of critical reactions against them, these frames have provided the impetus for the emergence of new questions. This book maneuvers through this in-between space in order to stretch our thinking and scholarship around public relations in global cultural contexts in newly productive directions.

As educators and scholars of public relations, we have noted three major gaps in the public relations body of knowledge. First, the phenomenon of globalization has not been addressed in all its complexity and remains under theorized and unpoliticized in the field. Second, the concept of culture also needs to be theorized in much more complex terms within public relations scholarship, especially in terms of its intersections with globalization. Within the current conditions of transnational flows and processes, culture has become increasingly deterritorialized and cultural identities have become fragmented (Sison, 2009). The meager theorizing on culture that does exist in our scholarship (Sriramesh, 2007) predominantly conceptualizes culture as static, clearly definable, and synonymous with territory. Additionally, the nation-state is still, problematically, conceptualized as the natural container of culture (Berking, 2003). Third, there has been insufficient focus on the range of possible paradigmatic approaches in the study of public relations. The social scientific (modernist) systems functionalist approach still dominates the field. The applied focus of this approach has been important to the profession in terms of promoting and stimulating debate about how public relations is and should be practiced. However, equally important are other approaches that question dominant models and beliefs and offer alternative ways of understanding the functions and effects of public relations practice. For example, there is a need for further inclusion of critical/cultural, interpretive, and postmodern approaches that theorize public relations as playing a significant role in the social construction of reality, and which interrogate how power permeates the processes of public relations in a global (dis)order where inequality is endemic (Shome & Hedge, 2002). The relationships between culture, communication, context, and power (Martin & Nakayama, 2010) in practice (as well as in scholarship) needs to be a key focus if we are to stay intellectually current (McKie, 2001), keep providing suggestions for how to improve practice, and genuinely engage with questions of ethics and social responsibility in public relations in a rapidly globalizing and interconnected world.

The purpose of this book is to address these three gaps. While some public relations scholarship has started exploring the complexities of globalization, the nature and role of culture, identity, and power in public relations (e.g., Curtin & Gaither, 2007), and is questioning the adequacy of only a social scientific functional approach to the field, no single volume exists that specifically brings these three issues under one umbrella. The aim of this book is to begin the work of filling these lacunae.

In the 1990s, public relations scholarship started engaging in paradigm debates. Very simply, a paradigm is the research worldview that scholars subscribe to in order to produce what they consider valid knowledge (Guba & Lincoln, 2008; Kuhn, 1996; Mittelman, 2004). While we lean toward the critical paradigm in this book, we have opted for a multiparadigmatic and dialectical stance that is open to all perspectives and values each for what it contributes toward strengthening the public relations body of knowledge. All paradigmatic approaches have something useful to contribute toward knowledge production (Martin & Nakayama, 1999), and even if they are sometimes contradictory to each other, the tensions generated through contradiction can work to stimulate further theoretical debate and reflection (Botan, 1993). It is also important that public relations scholars are able to engage in dialogue that acknowledges the philosophical grounding of the paradigm(s) which they are affiliated to, and the differences and similarities between different paradigms. Simply rejecting out of hand those who hold different philosophical positions is not what we advocate because this can lead to unproductive sparring that simply attempts to prove that one paradigm is better than others. Respecting philosophical differences and identifying the various merits and contributions that different paradigmatic perspectives bring to understanding both the practice and social, cultural, political, and economic significance of public relations in a multicultural world is what we advocate.

In this book, we opt out of the either-or approach to the paradigmatic debate and are vested in what we believe is a more fruitful both-and perspective that does not privilege any one paradigm as superior to others. The chapters within this volume theorize the complexities of globalization and culture and, along with these, power, as they apply to public relations, from critical/cultural, interpretive, postmodern, and social scientific perspectives. Such multiparadigmatic knowledge is essential for educators, scholars, students, and practitioners engaged in public relations in global cultural contexts to include in their theoretical toolboxes.

This introductory chapter charts out public relations in the context of globalization, notes the dynamic nature of culture and the current deficiencies in how it is theorized in public relations research, foregrounds the range of paradigmatic approaches in public relations scholarship, emphasizes some of the specific concerns of critical approaches, and concludes with a brief overview of the chapters in this volume.

Public Relations in the Climate of Globalization

There is no one theory or definition of globalization that can account for all of its complexities. The study of globalization is interdisciplinary, and the phenomenon has been theorized from cultural, economic, political, critical, postcolonial, and neoliberal (to name a few) perspectives (see Appelbaum & Robinson, 2005; Held & McGrew, 2000). Some scholars argue that globalization in its current form is just the latest phase, albeit a phase distinctly marked by hyper “technological revolution and global restructuring of capital” (Kellner, 2002, p. 287), in a process that is centuries old and started when humans began to cross borders and boundaries for purposes such as trade, spreading of religion, and colonization of other lands (see S. Hall, 1995; Sriramesh, 2009b). In its current form, according to Appelbaum and Robinson (2005),

Global studies views the world as a single interactive system, rather than as an interplay of discrete nation-states. Its focus is on transnational processes, interactions, and flows, rather than international relations, and on new sets of theoretical, historical, epistemological, and even philosophical questions posed by emergent transnational realities. (p. xi)

Appadurai (1996) articulates globalization in the language of scapes. He outlines five scapes: ethnoscapes or the heightened movement and migration of people (i.e., cultural bodies) across national and regional borders for work, study, leisure, and other purposes; mediascapes or the transnational spread of media content, images, and networks; technoscapes or the movement of technology/information across borders; financescapes or the flows of capital, financial data, and trade; and ideoscapes or the transnational movement and morphing of ideas and ideologies that result from the above scapes. These fluid scapes intersect in myriad configurations to produce flows and disjunctures in an environment of disorderly capitalism. Public relations, in its global scope, is caught up in as well as impacts the workings of these scapes.

Views on Globalization

Arguments about the effects of globalization have tended to coalesce around three perspectives: the globalist view, the skeptical view, and the transformational view (Held & McGrew, 2000; Martell, 2007).

• The globalists subscribe to a more economistic (i.e., neoliberal) perspective of globalization. They believe that the rapid spread of market capitalism and multinational corporations and growth in economic interdependence in recent decades has significantly decreased the sovereign power of nation-states. They argue that we live in a flatter (Friedman, 2005) world that is postnational in an economic sense. This is the “globalization-from-above” view.
• The skeptics argue that globalization is an imperialistic and uneven process. They believe that the already powerful nation-states are gaining economically and politically from the process, and that historically marginalized nation-states are left out of the benefits of globalization. From a cultural perspective, they argue that the power of nation-states is far from eroding, and that resurgent nationalism and antiglobalization movements are natural responses in the face of the threat of corporate globalization and cultural imperialism from above. This is the “globalization-from-below” view.
• The transformationalists take a middle ground approach. Straddling the hyperoptimism of the globalists and the critiques of the skeptics, they note the uncertainties produced by the emergent structures, flows, and experiences of globalization. They do not predict a “flat” world dominated by neoliberal ideology, are aware of the inequities of the globalization process, but are not antiglobalists. They are interested in more dialectical and less one-sided analyses of the complexities, erasures, and new possibilities that are emerging from global flows and disjunctures.

Whatever viewpoint one subscribes to, there is no denying that globalization has resulted in unprecedented compression of time and space (the world having become perceptibly smaller and interaction more immediate as a consequence of innovations, particularly in communication technologies) (Harvey, 1989), heightened interdependence between nation-states, and the “stretching” of social and professional relationships across vast expanses (Giddens, 1990). The difference between the “inside” and the “outside” of nation-states, cultures, and economies, for example, is harder to mark (Urry, 2005) as the local and the global inter-lock to transform binaristic perceptions about relations between “Us” and “Other,” thereby giving rise to hybrid formations, identities, and sensibilities (see Curtin & Gaither, 2007; Pal & Dutta, 2008). Forces of homogenization and heterogeneity are working simultaneously to generate new patterns and structures of inclusion and exclusion that coexist with some of the old.

State of Public Relations Scholarship and Practice in the Context of Globalization

What the above means for the study and practice of public relations in global cultural contexts is that we need to conceptualize client–public relationship building, culture, communication, and the spread of the industry itself in more interdependent, interconnected, and fluid ways since these phenomena are hallmarks of globalizing processes. Simultaneously, questions of power relations and the view that culture is a site of contested meanings cannot be ignored in a world where differences are intersecting at an increasing speed.

The globalization of the public relations industry is widely acknowledged and yet remains underresearched and meagerly theorized. Within the field, it is the comparative “inter-national” approach which was developed in the 1950s in response to the postcolonial growth of new nation-states and the increasing organization of the world around nation-state based systems during that time (Appelbaum & Robinson, 2005) which dominates. Following this logic, and constrained by its limitations, scholars continue to treat nation-states as separate (rather than interconnected) and culturally static units of analysis and focus on how culture, operationalized through variables conceptualized at the macrolevel of the nation-state, impacts the practice of public relations in these units. While such studies provide valuable information at one level, they are not equipped for understanding transnational interconnections and how factors such as time–space compression, global-local dialectics, and the global scapes identified by Appadurai (1996) permeate practice. As Pal and Dutta (2008) note, “The local-global interplay has fundamentally unseated the notion that public relations practices of nations can be captured, compared and evaluated in large-scale studies that seek to articulate master narratives of public relations practice” (p. 164).

Public relations, as a modern communications industry, is a largely Western phenomenon that developed alongside and in support of capitalism (Miller & Dinan, 2000, 2003). With the global surge of market capitalism since the late 1980s, and given the West-centric political economy of the public relations industry, Western-style public relations was quickly taken to other parts of the world. The globalist view described earlier undergirds much thinking about this spread which is propelled by neoliberal ideology. Trade and academic publications focus on the overseas growth of mostly U.S.-based agencies, the formation of agency networks, and best practices for multinational companies (most of which are based in the West). While there is an instrumental interest in understanding how to be effective in different cultural and political systems, the unquestioned assumption seems to be that Western-style public relations sets the norms for excellence that other cultures are measured against and are expected to emulate (Roth, Hunt, Stravropoulos, & Babik, 1996). Additionally, in burgeoning public relations academic programs around the world, the dominance of mostly U.S. public relations textbooks (Sriramesh, 2004), and the assumption of the primacy of U.S. models of public relations prevalent in these textbooks (McKie & Munshi, 2007) could be seen as a form of epistemic imperialism that suppresses local meanings and realities. Simultaneously, mainstream U.S. textbooks and curricula tend to have a U.S.-centric focus that leaves students in the United States largely unaware of the global diversity of the profession, and limited in their ability to understand complex cultural connectivity (see Bardhan, 2003a).

Indeed, as McKie and Munshi (2007) have detailed, it is only very recently that other histories of public relations have emerged which challenge claims that the United States led the development of the public relations profession (e.g., L’Etang, 2004; Toledano, 2005). While non-U.S. histories can and do demonstrate the error of assuming that all public relations follows U.S....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Public Relations in Global Cultural Contexts
• 2 Critical Perspectives in Global Public Relations: Theorizing Power
• 3 How Intercultural Communication Theory Informs Public Relations Practice in Global Settings
• 4 Culture, Communication, and Third Culture Building in Public Relations within Global Flux
• 5 Intercultural Typologies and Public Relations Research: A Critique of Hofstede’s Dimensions
• 6 The Need for a Postmodern Turn in Global Public Relations
• 7 Critiquing the Generic/Specific Public Relations Theory: The Need to Close the Transnational Knowledge Gap
• 8 Public Relations and Marginalization in a Global Context: A Postcolonial Critique
• 9 Chi-Based Strategies for Public Relations in a Globalizing World
• 10 Public Relations, Globalization, and Culture: Framing Methodological Debates and Future Directions
• Author Index
• Subject Index