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This study of multinational companies in China focuses on the role culture plays in relationship cultivation. The author interviewed 40 participants from 36 multinational companies in China. The findings revealed that characteristics of Chinese culture, such as family orientation, guanxi, relational orientation (role formalisation, relational interdependence, face, favour, relational harmony, relational fatalism and relational determination) had an influence on multinational companies’ relationship cultivation strategies. Multinationals from Western countries were found, however, to be more persistent in maintaining their own cultural values in relationship building than multinational companies from Asian countries.

China’s open‐market reform and rapid economic growth have generated a tremendous surge in activity and market investment by multinational corporations (MNCs). By 2000, 400 of the 500 most famous MNCs had invested in China. One distinctive feature of China’ s business environment, its authoritarian political system, requires MNCs to practise strategic public affairs to interact constantly with the different levels of Chinese government, respond to the policies and further influence business policy formation. This paper proposes a conceptual model of MNC‐government bargaining that is composed of international political economy, dependency theory and agency theory. It then examines (1) the international and domestic influences on MNC‐government bargaining in China and (2) the strategies MNCs employed to influence Chinese laws for foreign business in their interests. A case study of the Chinese ban on direct selling operations in 1998 and Amway’s strategies to remove the ban is presented. Results suggest that effective public affairs should engage in the following activities: (1) issues management, (2) constantly and systematically analysing the MNC’s bargaining power with the host government, (3) selecting public affairs strategies based on the analysis of MNC‐government bargaining, (4) exercising relationship management, and (5) being ethical in its practice.

This is a case study of Coca‐Cola's Chinese web site. It aims to examine how Coca‐Cola, the number one brand in the world, is using its web site to communicate with the publics in the world's largest market.

Uses a qualitative text analysis.

Coca‐Cola is practicing a “glocal” strategy, which integrates the ethnocentric and polycentric model in international public relations, to communicate with the Chinese publics through its Chinese web site.

This study provides insights for understanding the theory and practice of global corporate public relations.

Public relations (PR) education has not kept pace with the rapid globalisation that has occurred since 1992. The existing PR body of knowledge, and PR curricula around the world, have a US bias. In order to prepare PR students in various parts of the world to become effective multicultural professionals it is essential for experiences and perspectives from other continents to be integrated into PR education. The complexities of societal factors such as culture, political systems and media systems make Asia a challenging place to conduct strategic PR. It is time for educators to integrate experiences from other continents into the PR body of knowledge, thereby building PR curricula that contribute to training truly multicultural PR professionals.

In this historical analysis, Jacques Ellul’s theory of propaganda is applied to analyse the changes of China’s propaganda. It is found that China’s propaganda is undergoing structural transformations from depending on human organisation to extensive control and use of media technology. Sociological propaganda as a complement to political propaganda has significantly expanded; integration propaganda replaced agitation propaganda. International image management by the government has become a new dimension of China’s propaganda. The research is one of the first to observe such structural changes.

This study provides real-world evidence for the relationship between strategic communication from a global/multinational perspective and the effectiveness of corporate message strategies in the context of environment risk communication. Among sustainability issues, particulate matter (PM) air pollution has threatened the health and social wellbeing of citizens in many countries. The purpose of this paper is to apply the message framing and attribution theories in the context of sustainability communication to determine the effects of risk message characteristics on publics’ risk responses.

Using a 2 (message frame: gain vs loss) × 2 (attribution type: internal vs external) × 2 (country: China vs South Korea) between-subjects experimental design, the study examines the message framing strategies' on publics' risk responses (i.e. risk perception, risk responsibility attribution held toward another country and sustainable behavioral intention for risk prevention).

Findings include (1) main effects of message characteristics on participants’ risk responses; (2) the impact of country difference on participants’ differential risk responses and (3) three-way interactions on how risk message framing, risk threats type and country difference jointly affect not only participants’ risk perception and risk responsibility attribution but also their sustainable behavioral intention to prevent PM.

Although this study used young–adult samples in China and South Korea, the study advances the theory building in strategic environmental risk communication by emphasizing a global/multinational perspective in investigating differences among at-risk publics threatened by large-scale environmental risks.

The study's findings provide evidence-based implications such as how government agencies can enhance the environmental risk message strategy so that it induces more desired risk communication outcomes among at-risk publics. Insights from our study offer practical recommendations on which message feature is relatively more impactful in increasing intention for prosocial behavioral changes.

This study on all measured risk responses reveals important differences between at-risk young publics in China and South Korea and how they respond differently to a shared environmental risk such as PM. The study's findings provide new evidence that media coverage of global environmental issues needs to be studied at the national level, and cross-cultural comparisons are imperative to understand publics’ responses to different news strategies. Thus, this study offers implications for practitioners to understand and apply appropriate strategies to publics in a social way across different countries so as to tailor risk communication messaging.

This study offers new insights to help connect message framing effects with communication management practice at the multi-national level, providing recommendations for government communication practitioners regarding which PM message features are more likely to be effective in forming proper risk perception and motivate sustainable actions among at-risk publics in different countries.

This study aims to explore multifaceted corporate social responsibility (CSR) covered in popular English newspapers in the UK, USA, mainland China and Hong Kong from 2000 to 2016 via a computer-assisted analytical approach. This study moves the understanding of CSR away from corporate self-reporting to the mass media and raises interesting questions about the role of the news media in presenting CSR as a multifaceted, socially constructed concept.

Data were retrieved from CSR-related news articles from 2000 to 2016 that were archived in the LexisNexis database. Guided by the theoretical framework of agenda setting, a computer-assisted content analysis (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) was used to analyze 4,487 CSR-related articles from both business and non-business news sources. Analysis of variance was used to compare salient CSR topics in each country/region.

This study identifies newspapers as an alternate to corporations’ attempts to distribute CSR information and construct CSR meaning. The findings revealed that the news communicates a variety of CSR issues that are aligned or beyond what CSR was defined in corporate CSR reporting, as suggested in previous studies. In addition, CSR news coverages differ between the business and nonbusiness news sources. Furthermore, the media tone of CSR coverage significantly differed across the regions and between the business and nonbusiness newspapers.

Emerging topics in CSR news coverage, such as business education, could help companies identify untapped CSR realms in the market.

This study contributes to CSR communication research by adding a non-corporate perspective regarding what CSR means and should be focused on. The news media presents CSR using a heterogeneous approach as they not only provide surface reports on corporations’ CSR activities but also offer in-depth discussions.

Academics and professionals across management and communication fields have increasingly recognized significant contributions of engaged employees to organizations. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of communication channels, and communication attributes of transparency and authenticity on employee engagement in China.

A web survey was conducted with 407 employees randomly selected from a variety of medium-sized and large corporations in China.

The study results show that face-to-face interactions and social media are the most effective channels in building organizational transparency, authenticity, and engaging employees in China. Organizational transparency and authenticity demonstrate strong positive effects on employee engagement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study was among the first empirical attempts to examine the impact of corporate communication channels on employee engagement in China. It also contributes to the growing literature on corporate transparency and authenticity, two of the major communication trends identified in the twenty-first century.

This paper aims to examine the role of religion in influencing the public relations activity of Islamic banking institutions in Malaysia by adopting circuit of culture (COC) model as theoretical framework.

A narrative analysis is used in this study. This analysis has basically involved the application of symbolic interactionist tenets to respective websites and relevant documents of Islamic banks in Malaysia.

The paper has identified six Islamic value orientations elements, especially respect for religious authority, affinity with the past, fatalism, communal kinship, attachment to the eternal life and spirituality and idealism relative to public relations practice among the Islamic banks in Malaysia. The study finds that the respective banks are embedded with Islamic values in their communication tools that reflect public relations activity.

The theme of value orientations that have been generated and used in this study are constantly in flux. There are some other orientations that might be affecting the cultural value of public relations activities of Islamic banking in Malaysia. Furthermore, these value orientations are less effective in identifying dominating cultural factors that can be amended with situational flexibility, as the current study focuses on Malaysian context. Future research is required by incorporating a quantitative means of testing and measuring the effectiveness of website by using cultural-economic model for building.

The study suggests that public relations researchers should not ignore the vital relationship between religion and public relations activity. The findings of this paper provide Islamic banking institutions to improve and enhance their public relations activity.

This paper offers an additional literature related to public relations activity by using cultural-economic model. While previous studies have focused on product, brand matters and organization behavior to define cultural and public relation, very little research has been focused on the role of religion in determining public relations activity and cultural pattern. Indeed, no study has been focused explicitly on public relations activity of Islamic banks in Malaysia using COC.