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The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature on global public relations in order to scrutinize how contemporary transformations are conceptualized in the field, and what this means for the understanding of public.

The authors offer a critical analysis and discussion of recent publications in order to explore the nexus of “public”, “culture” and “global”, questioning whether the increased interest in a specific understanding of culture actually contributes to the field’s ability to deal with complex and transforming publics in a meaningful manner.

The majority of global public relations literature applies redundant understandings of globalization. It attaches prime importance to the concept of culture and contributes little to the understanding of transforming publics. Few scholars acknowledge the limitations of using “culture” for the definition of publics in global contexts. Alternative approaches to understanding “publics” in global public relations research and practice are hardly offered.

The findings imply that global public relations research would benefit from abandoning monolithic social science categories and from working transdisciplinary in order to refine its understanding of contemporary societal and social transformations and their implications for the understanding of public and relationship building.

The discussion indicates that public relations practitioners could benefit from reorienting their understanding of publics in globalizing societies in order to build and nourish mutually beneficial relationships. The authors apply the insight into contemporary business practices to offer public relations practitioners a starting point for reorientation.

The authors contribute to global public relations scholarship with an alternative approach to the understanding of transforming publics which merges the spatial turn and the practice turn known from wider humanities and social science research, and relevant business practices.

Codes of ethics are a moral reflection centred on the duties and rights of a given profession that establishes the minimum moral standards required. These codes imply self-regulation and therefore an individual application on the conduct of professionals. In this chapter we reflect on the main values that guide PR practice based on Schwartz's theory of basic human values, which measures universal values that are recognised throughout all major cultures. A qualitative and quantitative content analysis was carried out of the codes of ethics of six national PR and communication associations and of the Global Alliance's code. The ethics codes were analysed to study the priorities of values stressed by PR professional associations and to highlight the motivational values that may be present in them. Findings show that values contained in the codes of ethics are based on a system of 32 human values; three of the values – the common good, integrity and truthfulness – are identified in all the codes; motivational values relating to universalism, benevolence and conformity are also covered to varying degrees in all the texts. It has been confirmed that the Global Alliance code is the only text that deals with the values of all the motivations described by Schwartz. The PR codes of ethics are based on a list of common ethical values of a collective nature, which are mostly contemplated by the Global Alliance; the main difference at the national level is that Latin countries include in their texts more principles of ethical universalism.

As organisations become multinational, their reputations are increasingly subject to the effects of culture, politics, socioeconomics and other factors that become much more complex in the international arena than in domestic contexts. The crisis suffered by Coca‐Cola in Europe in 1999 can be a lesson to multinationals, small or large, which are not fully prepared to handle cross‐border issues. Studies conducted by this author have led to a useful model for effective public relations across borders, and have shown how European‐based multinationals are often better equipped than American firms to preserve their reputations on a global basis.

The aim of this paper is to present and compare two approaches (the global and the cultural) to public relationship management and to argue by reference to different cases, why the cultural approach can be considered more effective in establishing good relationships in different national cultural contexts.

The discussion identifies some of the limitations of recent thinking regarding the nature of a global public and the possibility to define and treat international publics as a global public in public relationship management. As validation of this claim, cases in the European context are presented to show that a cultural approach provides better interpretations of human behaviour in different national contexts and thus better understanding of organisations' publics.

It is argued, that the idea of a global public in public relationship management does not work in different national cultural contexts, while the traditional cultural approach can work in situations characterised by diversity in values, interests and principles.

The paper intends to demonstrate the enduring validity of the cultural approach in international contexts, especially where public relations activities are directed at establishing good relationships with publics belonging to different nations, cultures and interests.

The World Wide Web may be worldwide in its potential consumption, but hardly in its production. It demonstrates that globalisation is not a general state of affairs of the world, but a process of uneven development even, or maybe even more so, in the field of new technologies. The same can be said of public relations – its supply and demand are unevenly distributed around the world. This exploratory study investigates the global supply of public relations industry services and the supply of Internet services for public relations purposes in the USA, Austria and Slovenia.

This paper explores the creation of a global protocol on ethics in public relations. It begins by looking into the global ethical debate. It examines existing codes of ethics of a selection of public relations institutes and associations around the world, provides comparative analysis of these codes and discusses the pros and cons of their enforcement. It suggests that the immediate way forward in a highly litigious world is to provide some values‐based guidance to member associations together with access to an evolving database of case studies illustrating ethical problems. In the medium term more effective sanctions may be possible.

As a profession, public relations has become a global enterprise. Public relations education is only now beginning to catch up with the global nature of the profession. It is quite widely acknowledged that as far as public relations education is concerned, the USA is the leader in the number of universities that offer public relations courses as well as in the breadth and depth of the public relations curriculum. In its October 1999 report on the status of education in the USA, the Commission on Public Relations Education constituted by the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), called for curricula that prepared students to be effective communicators in the “age of global interdependence”. This paper argues that educators around the world are being hampered by the lack of an established body of knowledge (based on empirical evidence) about public relations practices in different parts of the world. This lack of evidence is preventing educators from preparing their students to become useful professionals who can meet the challenges of the “age of global interdependence”. The paper reviews literature identifying environmental variables that should help one understand public relations practices in different given countries. Based on this review, the paper operationalises these environmental variables as a next step towards cross‐national research. The paper also stresses the need to gather appropriate case studies in international public relations. Future researchers should be able to use this framework for conducting crossnational comparisons of public relations, thereby providing educators with the necessary empirical evidence to prepare the public relations professionals of the future.

This paper brings together new and existing resource material to provide a detailed profile of the regulatory environments affecting the practice of public relations in the UK, Italy and South Africa. It is hoped that by contextualising the social, political and economic factors specific to each country, readers will be more acutely aware of similarities and differences between PR practices in each country. This approach aims to help drive PR policy development by providing a useful template for further national and continental PR regulatory environment mapping.

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.