Globalization and Public Relations in Postcolonial Nations: Chal ...

on principles of social justice. Our purpose is to provide a starting point for discussion of globalization issues and of how public relations practices are adapting, not to provide the last word on the subject.

How the Book is Organized

Chapter 2 outlines the contours of the dominant discourse surrounding globalization—macroeconomics. In Appadurai’s (1996) terms, we explore the created social imaginary realms of globalization; in this case the finanscape, and the capital flows of the geopolitical economy. We examine how nations have been labeled according to their economic growth and “development” through various rhetorics. We delineate the implications of those rhetorics and how they have driven the development of public relations practice in differing economic contexts. We also examine how the dominant economic discourse has overshadowed the social issues and costs of globalization, particularly in postcolonial nations.

The seven subsequent chapters explore key issues relating to the disparate effects of globalization on postcolonial nations. The first six include extended case studies to illustrate the issue in depth. The approach is to outline the issues of globalization, then examine how public relations is responding to those issues. If at times the public relations practices we note seem almost an afterthought, this is because our research suggests that in all too many cases, they might be precisely that.

Chapter 3 examines issues of nation building and national identity, key considerations for many postcolonial nations, whose identity has often been defined by others. Our discussion examines ethnicity and the movement of people across borders as symptoms of globalization, providing an issue-driven look at Appadurai’s (1996) social imaginary realm of ethnoscapes. With globalization have come global diasporas, and brain drain is an ongoing challenge, particularly for postcolonial nations struggling