ABSTRACT
This chapter expresses that mainstream functionalist research in international public relations and public diplomacy, as it is commonly found in studies drawing on a nation branding approach, tends to reify countries and treats them as more or less 'natural entities'. It addresses nation branding as an influential functionalist framework that tends to promote a concretist understanding of the country as a central unit of analysis in IPR and PD research. The chapter focuses on how critical works instead provide an alternative view of the country as widely pluralistic and variable in a cultural, ethnic, religious and linguistic sense, and as an inherently and deeply divided entity. It also focuses on any entity-agent construction of a country as an ascription, and model possible variations in constructing countries as social entities by drawing on concepts from research on the perception of collective entities and a neo-institutional model of agency.
