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

intellectual property rights on Indian cotton farmers and Ethiopian coffee growers closes the chapter.

Chapter 7 looks at technology, including appropriate technology, and how emerging technologies from cell phones to the Internet simultaneously connect and separate the world, creating the multidirectional flows of Appadurai’s (1996) technoscapes. A case study on Estonia—or “E-stonia,” as some call it—traces the rise of technology in this small Eastern European country and how the nation has used the Internet to enhance private–public partnerships, boost economic development, increase civic participation, and brand its national identity.

Labor issues, from offshoring to urbanization, supply-chain management to consumer labeling, are examined in chapter 8. We explore issues surrounding the role of gender in labor, including the debate on microcredit. We also examine child labor, including children’s right to work and labor unions. Corporate diplomacy is one developing area of public relations practice that is being used to effect change in foreign government labor policies. The role of corporate diplomacy, trade quotas, CSR, and gender are given more in-depth treatment in a case study of the Cambodian garment industry.

Chapter 9, the final issue chapter, encompasses an outgrowth of the labor issues discussed in chapter 8—human slavery and trafficking. It examines how poverty has given rise to chattel slavery, debt bondage, and contract slavery throughout the world. Much remains unknown about this illegal, and therefore hidden, practice; thus the chapter is a brief look at the subject, focusing on a number of smaller cases studies. We discuss how awareness campaigns by regulatory bodies, NGOs, and individual crusaders are putting this issue on the world’s agenda. Countries and companies, in turn, are starting to respond by monitoring and managing their supply chains. Yet much work remains to be done to raise consumer awareness.