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

and high rates of newspaper readership. Increasingly, global firms are partnering with local firms—such as Edelman’s 2004 joint venture agreement with R & P Management Communications and Burson-Marsteller’s 2005 acquisition of Genesis—to provide culturally adept investor relations, corporate social responsibility, healthcare, and IT expertise, to name just a few growth areas of practice (“In Fast-Growing,” 2009).

The Rhetoric of Competition

India’s global market expansion in the high-tech and services industries has spawned a rhetoric of competition with the United States and Europe. For example, the subtext of Friedman’s (2005) “the world is flat” message is that the United States is being left behind. He recalls his parents’ telling him to eat his dinner because children in China and India were starving; he tells his children to finish their homework because children in China and India are waiting to take their jobs. The rhetoric of competition frequently uses statistics to drive home the message, such as the fact that China and India each add more college graduates per year to their work forces than do the United States and Europe combined (Meredith, 2008).

Few question whether thinking of the global economy as a zero-sum game is actually correct (Sachs, 2005) or stop to ask whether richer nations simply help improve the lives of the poor (Stiglitz, 2007a), yet the ramifications of this rhetoric for global business, diplomatic relations, and allocating aid resources are immense. Take, for example, the rhetoric of offshoring, a subject we discuss in depth in chapter 8. In 2010 in the United States, 29 candidates for political office in a one-week period ran ads attacking their opponents for outsourcing jobs to China (Chen, 2010). In France Renault’s plan to build some of its cars in Turkey brought a sharp rebuke from then president Nicolas Sarkozy: “We are not putting in all this money to support our carmakers so that the totality of the factories go abroad” (Keller, 2010, para. 3).

The negative rhetoric surrounding offshoring in industrial nations is matched by the positive tone used to describe its effects on the BRICS