| Chapter 1: | Introduction—Surveying the Cyberterrain of Developing Country Head of State Web Sites |
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Even in the arguably developed countries of Europe, public relations research is comparatively limited (Hazleton & Kruckeberg, 1996) and disproportionately from Great Britain.
This research purposely avoids the more studied areas of the globe and instead delves into countries that are not only, by definition, less developed, but also less studied. The remainder of this chapter provides a brief global overview of public relations by the regions comprising the study population: Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. The background study in Chapter 2 is divided into three sections to reflect the topical areas that inform this research: public relations and the World Wide Web, government relations, and international public relations. Chapter 3 outlines public relations, propaganda, and persuasion theory, all three of which provide useful ways of informing both the quantitative content analysis of the 31 developing country presidential Web sites and the narrative analysis of the four Web sites to be analyzed. Chapter 4 outlines the two methods used in this study, which is followed by the quantitative content analysis results in Chapter 5 and the narrative analysis results in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 is the discussion of both analyses.
Public Relations in Context: A Global Overview
Public relations is not uniformly practiced around the world (Epley, 1992). By cobbling together case studies and scholarly overviews by continent, however, it is possible to develop a rough frame for viewing the public relations function by continent. Of the 31 developing countries studied, 11 are in Europe,6 8 are in Asia, 7 in Africa, 2 are in the Middle East, 2 are in the Caribbean, and 1 is in North America (see Table 1-2 at the end of the chapter).
The following section briefly summarizes the public relations literature in these areas, excluding North America, which is discussed in Chapter 2, and the Caribbean, which has not been studied in public relations scholarly literature to date.