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This is a conceptual paper that tries to highlight, articulate and think about the relationship of public relations (PR) with culture, and examines how Saudi Arabian traditional cultural practices, such as wasta and karam, influence how PR functions in this area. While PR in the Middle East is currently still developing, its present state is affected by confusion as to what PR means and what it should do in a company. Researchers have examined what determines the state of PR in this area by examining the economic development of the countries and the relationship between PR practitioners and journalists. Existing research has, however, chosen to look at Arab PR through a Western lens, which means they have examined the state of PR in this area by Western standards of PR and have not taken into consideration Arab culture. The paper will examine how the elements and cultural differences complicate the understanding of PR practice in Saudi Arabia and therefore what questions need to be asked to be able to clarify these things at a theoretical level, but also to be able to look at the practice in analytical terms.

Student counselling in schools is an area that is well established in both developing and developed countries around the world, and has been made available to a wide range of ages (i.e. 5–18 years old) (Harris, 2013). In addition, while the many benefits of student counselling have been widely researched and documented, the problems and obstacles encountered by student counsellors has received less attention. This research aims to combine a brief review of the literature, with the researcher's own 16 years of professional experience of student counselling in Saudi schools, in order to provide a critical account of Saudi student counselling practices. The research shows that cultural, social and financial barriers and challenges may be stopping student counselling practices from developing effectively in Saudi Arabia. It puts forward ways in which student counselling practices might be improved in order to help children and young people in schools across Saudi Arabia.

The chapter portrays the GCC region starting with its history. It overviews the evolution of the region and particularly the establishment of the GCC. Furthermore, it depicts the overall economic profile of the region and its socioeconomic development since its inception. It ends with the content description of the whole book.

This chapter aims to illustrate the different environmental factors and their impact on entrepreneurship in Qatar. Despite its economic prosperity and governmental efforts to foster entrepreneurship Qatar still has not achieved its full potential in this regard. The analysis of the situation of entrepreneurship in Qatar shows no insurmountable difficulties at the macro-level. The problems are rather due to culture generated personality traits that are common among Qatari people. In fact, the fear of failure and the aversion towards risk and stress are negatively impacting entrepreneurial intentions among the population. The example of Qatar shows that a favourable economic situation does not necessarily promote entrepreneurship. The Qatari government is making huge efforts to optimise the legal and economic situation in order to reduce business risk and facilitate start-ups. However, it still has to invest more in human development in order to make Qatari people aware of the opportunities that their country is offering for innovative business ideas.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the concept and state of the art of stakeholder management. The objectives include the coverage of the key aspects of stakeholder management from the perspective of the literature, the synthesis of some problems of implementing stakeholder management in developing countries and formulation of solutions to these problems, and guidance on implementation of stakeholder management in developing countries. Twelve semi-structured virtual interviews with practitioners in some developing countries informed most of the contents of the chapter: the problems and solutions concerning stakeholder management in developing countries where the traditional type of procurement is still commonly used for project delivery. The content analysis of the interview data showed that, apart from the internal stakeholders of clients, design consultants, contractors and their teams of professionals, and other workers, another set of project stakeholders would include community organizations, trade unions, non-government organizations and sundry individuals, or groups. These many stakeholders present high chances of conflicting stakes. Power influences the prioritization of stakes in developing countries, i.e., the interests of more powerful stake-holders are accorded higher priority. Government and public establishments are often considered to be powerful; hence, there is often a general reluctance to challenge their stakes and those of the stakeholders associated with them. Moreover, some traditions and cultures are strong in communities, regions, or nations, and stakeholder engagements follow these norms. Some details of traditional protocols that are observed while negotiating conflicting stakes are often not documented, and the knowledge needed is sometimes deployed tacitly. Meanwhile, some socio-cultural protocols and government bureaucracy may slow down project procedures, but claiming for time extensions and other reliefs by project participants is virtually never done on these grounds. Another major influence in some developing countries is land ownership, which tends to be a leveraging factor on which some external stakeholders either bargain for compensation and concessions or attempt to disrupt a project. As “knowledge is power,” there is scope for increasing the awareness and thus power of especially external stakeholders in developing countries.

One of the countries where tradition and modernity meet is Qatar. From a very poor country in the 20^th century to ultra-modern in the 21^st century, Qatar became a place in which visitors, workers and business people can find what they look for. The richness of the country’s diversified business outlook and culture appeals various stakeholders to stay, visit and do business in this country. In this line, the chapter portrays fundamental information on Qatar, its traditional doing of business through bazaars, the current context of business pursued in this country and the future regarding the country’s business stand up.

In October 2016, a photo went viral in which Chinese executives of the Korean corporation Samsung were kowtowing at a sales meeting in Heibei Province. The picture created a scandal; online bloggers claimed South Korean executives “forced” their Chinese counterparts to kowtow to apologize for product failure with one of their products, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Kowtowing has different meanings in China and in Korea and debate on the meaning of bowing arose. The case discusses the scandal and encourages students to reflect on cultural differences and their effects on business practices.

This chapter explores the concepts of ethics, morals and social responsibility from organisational and societal perspectives covering both marketing that is focused on profit and marketing focused on bringing about social benefit. It discusses the meanings of social responsibility from different paradigmatic viewpoints and highlights the advantages and limitations of particular approaches. The chapter also considers some aspects of legal and regulatory frameworks and the potential for the development of codes of conduct for socially responsible for-profit marketing and social marketing. The discussion is positioned in a global context and is grounded by intercultural considerations and the diversity of ethical perspectives and norms across cultures.

People of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) backgrounds, representing around 28 per cent of Australians and hundreds of ethnic backgrounds and language groups, are often overlooked or under-considered in health communication campaigns. This diversity presents challenges for those wishing to successfully communicate health messages, particularly given the fragmenting communications landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light many of these challenges and the, often, limited consideration given to CALD communities in communicating urgent health messages. This chapter reviews the Victorian government’s innovative CALD Youth Content Campaign which engaged social media influencers to communicate COVID-19 messages through channels not ordinarily accessible to government communication teams. From this case study, we draw insights for future health campaigns aimed at diverse audiences.

Stories are integral parts of our being and living and have immense power to harm or to heal. The time is right to advance a new process that we call story-bridging, because of where society is now poised, and because of a prevailing culture of vehement separation and polarization, with attendant false-storying. Story-bridging taps into the power of story. It is a process of engaging sensitively and positively with others where there are opposing views (at all levels: individual, community, organization, institution, nation-state), where there have been negative impacts on society, the economy, the environment, and our essential connectedness. Story-bridging is a process of creating, refining and sharing stories in a way that ignites connections and fosters exciting possibilities.

Using modified versions of the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) scale, we conducted surveys among German and Chinese university students. Our tests confirm previous findings that risk taking is indeed domain-specific. More importantly, our results show that differences in risk behavior are attributable more to perceived risk than to expected benefits. Risk behavior is almost entirely predictable by differences in the attitude towards perceived risk, but less so by differences in the subjective evaluation of expected benefits. Additionally, our study measures risk attitude through two distinct methodologies: on an individual-subject level and on a group-level. We find that the individual-subject risk attitude can lead to inadequate conclusions. Furthermore, our research highlights the relevance of national culture as an important factor for explaining risk-taking propensity. Our findings yield substantial support for the ‘cushion hypothesis’ and highlight the usefulness of the cultural dimension of individualism versus collectivism in order to explain risk behavior.

Contracting Global Virtual Teams as part of global IT outsourcing is currently en vogue. As might be expected when virtual team members are from different countries, cultural factors play an important role in the success of outsourcing. However, there have been very few studies that assess the effect of culture on IT outsourcing and virtual teams. This conceptual chapter addresses this oversight by looking at the effect of cultural differences on IT outsourcing and virtual teams’ performance. The applicable literature on outsourcing, virtual teams, and culture is analyzed and a framework of offshore outsourcing success is developed. This framework includes the concept of psychic distance to better understand the phenomenon of virtual teams and outsourcing success. Adding this as a key research component provides a more realistic way of researching global virtual teams. Future directions for research based on the developed framework are also provided. By assessing the cultural differences of virtual teams in IT outsourcing, our research framework will help academics pursue this growing business phenomenon.