In this study, the concepts of culture, public relations and governance as well as the relationships among them have been studied with regard to the critical theory. How the concepts are read and perceived determine how they are signified and known; and what is known about them defines how they are perceived. What we perceive and internalize build our social practices. In Bourdieu’s terms, the power struggles that are waged for the purpose of transforming and maintaining the social world are, in fact, the struggles used to protect or transform the categories enabling the perception of this world. Such categories spread by means of the media and are being conveyed into public discourses. Public sphere is the name of the struggle over this categorization. Therefore, this meaning formation process is also important being one of the effective categories for the arrangement or structuring of the society and the function and practices of the governance concept, which is differentiated in two paradigms being interpreted with respect to the relationship between public relations and culture within the frame of this study. The interaction between governance and public relations along with the functions they assume will be discussed by employing the dialectic laws that the two paradigms originate from namely: Hegel’s idealist dialectic and Marx’s materialistic dialectic. In the same way, how the meanings and functions of public relations and governance are perceived and used in the context of different readings will be discussed.

Key words: Governance, paradigm, public relations, culture, public sphere.