The emergence and development of teaching public relations in the United Arab Emirates: an in-depth look

Abstract

PurposeThe development of teaching public relations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is an important topic to uncover because it is related to and to some extent parallel with the development of the UAE and its vital sectors. The purpose of the study is determine the circumstances of the emergence of teaching public relations in the UAE, to investigate public relations education offered in the UAE universities, to discuss the development of public relations education including challenges and opportunities.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted 12 semistructured interviews with public relations educators in the UAE universities to understand the importance, development and current status of public relations and education.FindingsThe finding indicates a lot of developments took place in the establishment of public relations programs and its professionalization within a short time span, but more empirical research is needed to address the issues that have been brought up in the study.Research limitations/implicationsThe current research looked at the undergraduate public relations programs, but the status of graduate programs in communication and public relations needs to be investigated. More research in academic field is needed to discuss how the development of the public relations education influenced the public relations practice in UAE.Originality/valueThere is not much research done specifically on the public relations education in the UAE. The study sheds light on understanding the perspective of public relations educators on public relations programs and provides insights on how public relations education can be integrated to the local context without losing the global perspective.

Editorial 29.1: History (and professionalization) of public relations

“…The conference has resulted in several special issues and edited books, which have contributed towards the development of the discipline (IHPRC, n.y) and the CCIJ has also supported this conference with a special issue published in Volume 25, Issue 4 guest edited by Anastasios Theofilou (lead conference organizer), Dustin W. Suppa, Kate Fitch and Anastasia Veneti, a group of scholars based in the UK, US and Australia. In that first CCIJ PR history collection, scholars analysed issues such as fascist propaganda (Thompson, 2020), the writing style of a prominent Irish PR educator (McGrath, 2020), open diplomacy and the link between diplomacy, PR and journalism (Gellrich et al , 2020), 19th century PR campaign to defend national sovereignty (Tantivejakul, 2020), a historical account of creating Chartered Institute of PR in the UK contributing to writing the history of institutionalizing PR (Gregory, 2020), the post-war television and PR in the context of family planners (Borge, 2020), PR measurements in the 1920s (Anderson, 2020), the history of teaching PR in Saudi Arabia (Zamoum and Gorpe, 2020), history in the PR curriculum (Fitch and L’Etang, 2020) and the role of PR in sponsored national narratives (Kinnear, 2020). The issue alone has made a meaningful contribution to the emerging discipline of PR history scholarship; however, other papers have been published from the same conference in other journals.…”