| Chapter 1: | Introduction—Surveying the Cyberterrain of Developing Country Head of State Web Sites |
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Large portions of the world, including the Middle East and Africa, are considered understudied, while Asia is an intermediary region between the understudied and most studied regions of Europe and the United States. In these areas, evidence suggests that countries with English as a primary language are producing the most public relations research. This has tilted public relations research away from a culturally reflexive research base into a morass of studies that often favor Western-based scholarship at the expense of linguistic and cultural diversity, socioeconomic conditions, and other variables that influence the study and practice of public relations worldwide.
Public relations researchers have recently begun to identify the cultural variables that affect public relations, yet no overarching study has pulled those variables together into any comprehensive theoretical framework. This book challenges the use of Western-based theories in an effort to develop a preliminary model that might account for cultural variables and generate concomitant culturally sensitive theory. The field of development for this model is the World Wide Web, which provides a uniform communication modality across continents and cultures. The next chapter culls scholarship pertaining to public relations and the World Wide Web, government relations, and international public relations, and identifies themes that connect and differentiate them.