Offshoring

Much has been written about the outsourcing phenomenon. Most authors have attempted to measure and/or minimize its effects or show that "in the long run" the benefits will outweigh the costs. Many authors have described the best way to manage the outsourcing process. But what is the morality of offshoring? What is its "rightness" or "wrongness?" Little analysis of the ethics of offshoring has been completed thus far. This paper develops a preliminary framework for analyzing the ethics of offshoring. The first section of this paper following this introduction discusses the meaning of the terms ethics, morality and fairness. The second section looks at data for

The paper investigates the diversified patterns of outsourcing in the Lombardy region and relates them to the probability of introducing product and process innovation. Based on a large firm-level survey, we show that outsourcing processes are strongly regionally embedded and that offshoring is still a limited phenomenon. Outsourcing strategies are shown to have a positive impact on firms’ innovation. In particular, the outsourcing of service activities contributes the most to innovation, thus suggesting that firms successfully pursue core strengthening strategies. Our econometric estimates show that both geographical and organizational proximity matter. Indeed, the positive association of services with innovation is strongly related to their regional dimension, which points toward the importance of local user-producer relationships. When outsourcing crosses national borders, keeping the outsourced activities at least loosely connected to the firm appears critical, as offshoring to ...

Offshore outsourcing to vendors in foreign countries causes unique challenges which need to be understood and managed effectively. This paper explores cultural differences in IS offshoring arrangements involving German client organizations that outsource application development activities to Indian vendors. For this purpose, a research framework is developed based on both theoretical considerations and specific empirical observations from multiple case studies. The goal is to (1) explore the nature of cultural differences in offshore outsourcing arrangements in depth and to (2) analyze the relationship between those cultural differences and offshore outsourcing success. Based on the case findings, implications and practices for the management of offshore development projects are outlined. The results indicate that cultural differences in terms of power distance, IS designer values, and an active versus passive working attitude critically affect several dimensions of relationship quality, thereby influencing offshore outsourcing success. A clear definition of roles and mechanisms, strong leadership, and an active management of culture by adapting to either the client's or the vendor's national culture appeared to be effective ways to manage cultural differences.

Dies ist eine Arbeit über die verschieden Methoden der Produktionsverlagerung.
Ziel war es die jeweiligen Methoden voneinander abzugrenzen und deren Chancen und Risiken auszuarbeiten.
Die Arbeit ist auf Deutsch geschrieben.
Jegliche Verbreitung der Arbeit, insbesondere deren Inhalte ist untersagt.
Deren Richtigkeit ist nicht unbedingt geprüft.

have posed in their short conceptual paper in this issue. Dynamics of German backshoring activities over the past 15 years are described and differences in motivations between the main backshoring modes are depicted. Further implications for global value chains and local manufacturing modes are discussed and future research directions are proposed.

The offshoring of knowledge services has become the stuff of newspaper headlines and U.S. presidential debates. Here, we view the antecedents of the current state of affairs. In the 1980s services offshoring was a trivial portion of the economy, but the seeds of today's situation were planted then. A combination of U.S. government neglect, foreign government activism, a culture change among business people concerning service processes, technological advances, and cultural relationships among countries have created the specific services offshoring configuration of today. #

The research is about the different shoring models, unveiling mostly the benefits of using offshoring or nearshoring models. Aim of this research to differentiate the two models and try to find the drivers of extending the nearshoring models in the Central Eastern Europe countries. The research results based on mostly literature review but to disclose the market situation and nearshoring trends it based on an interview series as well. The study deals with the beneficial and the impeding factors of the nearshoring in CEE countries and shows some criticism about the shoring activity as a whole.

OPEN ACCESS: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/TQM-11-2019-0260/full/html

Purpose
Recently, many firms have reshored manufacturing activities back to their home countries to increase customer perceptions of product quality. However, there is no evidence that relocating production to the home country improves customer-perceived quality. This study intends to address this gap by assessing the variations between pre- and post-reshoring product quality, as perceived by domestic customers.
Design/methodology/approach
Data were collected through a questionnaire, which used the case of an Italian fashion brand that had reshored its manufacturing from Romania to Italy as the stimulus. Two analyses of the collected data (n = 399) were conducted, applying both 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design and partial least squares–structural equation modelling (PLS–SEM) multigroup analysis.
Findings
Reshoring increased the level of perceived product quality only for customers that both were aware of the firm’s past offshoring decision and had high levels of affective ethnocentrism. For all other customers, no significant variations between pre- and post-reshoring product quality were observed.
Research limitations/implications
This study challenges previous findings, revealing that only a minor share of customers perceived products to be of higher quality after reshoring.
Practical implications
Increasing customer-perceived quality may not be a sufficient motivation to select the reshoring strategy. In addition, when announcing reshoring strategies, producers should appeal to customers’ emotions and not use rational arguments about objective product quality.
Originality/value
This is the first study to assess variations between pre- and post-reshoring customer-perceived quality and to identify factors that explain such variations.

Business Process Outsourcing is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization's critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications. Outsourcing, Offshore-Outsourcing and Offshoring are used interchangeably despite important technical differences. Outsourcing involves the transfer of organizational function to a third party; when the third party is located in another country the term Offshore-Outsourcing should be used. Offshoring in contrast, represents the transfer of an organizational function to another country, regardless of whether the work stays in the corporation or not. Outsourcing and offshoring are not new concepts to the global economy. Earlier, offshoring was mostly restricted to manufacturing through technology-transfer during the maturity and decline phases of product life cycle. Major advantages of outsourcing are cost-reduction, comparative advantage by division of labour and economies of scale, lower turnaround time, data-backup for disaster management. Areas of concern are service quality, data-theft, attrition rate, privacy laws and personalinformation misuse and credit-card frauds. There are other issues also like job-lose in the outsourcing country, cultural differences and information security. The Indian outsourcing industry is growing fast and has become a major investment area. With increased focus on information security and a comprehensive IT act it is going to get a further impetus in coming years.

Within a higher-dimensional incomplete specialization Heckscher-Ohlin framework, we first develop a gravity model that views bilateral gravity equations as statistical relationships constrained on countries' multilateral specialization patterns. Second, we test our model empirically by using a uniquely detailed and large European data set. We show that trade in the parts and components of capital goods is driven by supply-side country differences relative to the rest of the world, compatible with models of incomplete specialization and trade. We take our results as evidence of the existence of international production networks in Europe, driven by trade-offs between wages and coordination costs.

La globalización neoliberal fomentó una paradójica tensión entre las supuestas tendencias hacia la homogeneización y uniformización social, y la aparición de nuevas desigualdades sociales. La sociedad actual, lejos de experimentar las consecuencias del llamado “fin del trabajo”, expresa sus efectos en cuanto a las formas de gestión laboral promovidas, la flexibilización, la desregulación de relaciones laborales y la pérdida de calidad de las ocupaciones. En este entorno, resulta incluso contradictorio que los conceptos de empleo y desempleo hayan perdido sus significados clásicos ante el aumento del trabajo asalariado socialmente desprotegido y precario, la desaparición de las modalidades salariales convencionales, la expansión del trabajo independiente, autónomo o por cuenta propia, y la emergencia de ocupaciones cada vez más heterogéneas y desigualmente rentables que afectan a gran parte de la fuerza de trabajo, en particular, a la social y demográficamente más vulnerable, dando lugar a nuevas modalidades de desigualdad social y pobreza.

This study attempts to increase the understanding of how offshoring influences the introduction of new products and services. Focusing on the offshoring of those business functions that provide direct knowledge inputs for innovation (i.e., production, R&D, and engineering), we propose that offshoring has an inverted U-shaped influence on firm innovativeness. Additionally, we provide an upper echelon contingency perspective by considering the moderating role of two top management team (TMT) attributes (i.e., informational diversity and shared vision). Using a cross-industry sample with lagged data, we find that offshoring has an inverted U-shaped influence on firm innovativeness and that this relationship is steeper in firms with high TMT informational diversity and in firms with low TMT shared vision.

The recognition that innovation occurs in networks of heterogeneous actors and requires broad systemic support beyond knowledge brokering has resulted in a changing landscape in the intermediary domain in the increasingly market-driven agricultural sector in developing countries. This paper presents findings of an explorative case study that looked at 22 organizations identified as fulfilling an intermediary role in the Kenyan agricultural sector. The results show that these organizations fulfill functions that are not limited to distribution of knowledge and putting it into use but also include fostering integration and interaction among the diverse actors engaged in innovation networks and working on technological, organizational, and institutional innovation. Further, the study has identified various organizational arrangements of innovation intermediaries, with some organizations fulfilling a specialized innovation brokering role and other intermediaries taking on brokering as a side activity, while substantively contributing to the innovation process. On the basis of these findings, we identify a typology of four innovation intermediation arrangements including technology broker, systemic broker, enterprise development support, and input access support. The results indicate that innovation brokering is a pervasive task in supporting innovation and will require policy support to embed it in innovation support arrangements, but without prescribing a one-size-fits-all approach.

In the face of utopian discussions on global citizenship and cosmopolitan identities, this article argues that the concept of off shoring provides insights into rising realities in elite mobility and the formation of expat communities. I do this in the context of the proliferation of 'golden passport programmes', through which rich people are naturalised as citizens in the countries where they invest. Showing how the global citizenship utopia is materialised locally, I argue that golden passports are the continuation of off shoring by other means. Presenting an ethnographic portraiture of those enabling Russians to acquire the Cypriot passport, as well as how the Russophone community takes shape locally in Cyprus, the article shows how 'expat communities' can form as enclaves of safety that off er off shore convenience for certain elite community members. It also shows that golden passports exacerbate local inequality, undermining the egalitarian utopia of citizenship at large, with detrimental eff ects on the local sense of civitas.

This study investigates estimation errors due to hidden costs—the costs of implementation that are neglected in strategic decision-making processes—in the context of services offshoring. Based on data from the Offshoring Research Network, we find that decision makers are more likely to make cost-estimation errors given increasing configuration and task complexity in captive offshoring and offshore outsourcing, respectively. Moreover, we show that experience and a strong orientation towards organizational design in the offshoring strategy reduce the cost-estimation errors that follow from complexity. Our findings contribute to research on the effectiveness of sourcing and global strategies by stressing the importance of organizational design and experience in dealing with increasing complexity.

The objective of this study is to explore factors that affect employee engagement in financial offshore organizations in India. Sixty employees involved in offshoring financial services were interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data collected in the study. Three main themes were identified: (1) implicit benefits, (2) organizational culture and (3) organizational policies. The findings of this study are important due to their practical implications. First, the factors will encourage employers to make more employee friendly policies, and second, by resolving the employee issues raised in this paper, it is anticipated that the employers will be able to enhance the overall efficiency of their workforce and improve the employer-employee relationship.

ABSTRACT Research and Development (R&D) offshoring in emerging countries has increased greatly in the last decade. The literature on this topic has been mostly interested in the motivations and determinants, while the effects on home innovation have been less explored. Firms carry out most of their R&D at home and rely on a dispersed network of foreign R&D units embedded in different local contexts; however, although firms from advanced countries are the top investors in foreign R&D and emerging countries are top destinations, the effects of R&D captive offshoring in emerging countries on the creation of knowledge at home—i.e. on headquarter and home system of innovation in advanced countries—have been neglected. Based on the literature on the knowledge-based view of the firm and the reverse knowledge transfer (RKT), I discuss two possible effects, i.e. the “RKT-based division of labor” hypothesis and the “hollowing-out” hypothesis. I review the recent empirical evidence in support of either of the two hypotheses, and it emerges that positive effects are likely to occur, but also that there is a need for further empirical evidence.

Traditional structural change theories study the dynamics of inter-sector labour-reallocation in autarky models. We analyse how model-results change if open economy setting is assumed, where we focus on the impacts of intermediate trade in a multi-sector growth model with capital accumulation. We show that, when controlling for specialisation-effects, open economy features a relatively high employment share of capital/manufacturing sector and a relatively low rate of labour-reallocation across consumption industries in comparison to autarky. The process of tertiarisation (transition to a services economy) is relatively slow in the intermediate trade model in comparison to the autarky model.

0 7 4 0 -7 4 5 9 / 0 6 / $ 2 0 . 0 0 © 2 0 0 6 I E E E focus ments engineering life cycle related to global software development. RE is a software project's most critical phase; 2,3 the RE phase's success is essential for the project's success.

This paper examines management whipsawing practices in the European auto industry based on more than 200 interviews and a comparison of three auto makers. We identify four distinct ways in which managers stage competition between plants to extract labor concessions: informal, hegemonic, coercive, and rule-based whipsawing. Practices at the three examined auto firms vary and change, we find, due to two factors: structural whipsawing capacity and management labor relations strategy. In the context of economic globalization whipsawing is an effective means for managers to extract concessions, to loosen national institutional constraints, and to diffuse employment practices internationally.

This book provides a vibrant depiction of actual offshoring practices. The authors put forth eight cases in rich detail. These accounts of real-world scenarios highlight critical questions for academic research. In addition to eight chapters each devoted to an offshoring event at a Danish company, the text includes opening and closing remarks. The introductory chapter provides a strong summary of the phenomenon in general and the context in particular. Pyndt and Pedersen’s overarching message is that there are many different successful strategies. They use a typology to present the phenomenon in two dimensions: internalization and internationalization. Within this typology, offshoring is synon- ymous with productive activity taking place outside the home country while outsourcing is productive activity taking place outside the enterprise. The cases then reveal that economic activity may be scattered along these different dimensions – even within a single Danish firm competing globally.
While the firms are all Danish, what Pyndt and Pedersen relay is applicable to other European, Asian, or American enterprises. And while the actors and events in the cases represent valid universal business situations, the cases exhibit a refreshing tone that is largely absent in most classroom cases. Further, the typical North American case deals with strategy formulation but seldom implementation or execution. Some of these cases move beyond the ‘decision point’ to provide a glimpse of what is called for, but still leave plenty of open questions for the reader to analyze.
The remark in the opening pages that offshoring is not a zero sum game, i.e., that the company that offshores and the recipient country both gain, needs to recognize the losses in the ‘home’ country. The offshored part of the business involves displaced workers and inputs no longer sought in the ‘home’ country. Outsourcing decisions ‘have come under increasing scrutiny and criticism’ (Graf and Mudambi, 2005: 254). This politically charged discussion usually begins with savings in labor costs (Ramamurti, 2004). Lewin (2005: 491) offers that, ‘companies in countries with strong society/worker compacts may experience greater challenges in adopting and executing offshoring strategies.’ Less tactfully, a myopic unionized workforce (stereotypically inflexible and with high wages) may lead to its own demise.

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being 'snakes' and 'spiders'. Snakes are processes whose sequencing is dictated by engineering; spiders involve the assembly of parts in no particular order. This paper studies spatial unbundling as frictions fall, showing that outcomes are very different for snakes and spiders, even if they share some features. Both snakes and spiders have in common a property that lower frictions produce discontinuous location changes and 'overshooting'. Parts may move against their comparative costs because of proximity benefits, and further reductions in frictions lead these parts to be 'reshored'. Predictions for trade volumes and the number of fragmented stages are quite different in the two cases. For spiders, a part crosses borders at most twice; the value of trade increases monotonically as frictions fall, except when the assembler relocates and the direction of parts trade is reversed. For snakes the volume of trade and number of endogenously determined stages is bounded only by the fragmentation of the underlying engineering process, and lower frictions monotonically increase trade volumes.

The impact of culture on knowledge management in international teams is an important topic which is still not well understood. We want to contribute to the discussion by presenting two case studies of small software teams involved in distributed software development. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing four knowledge sharing practices: status meetings and maintaining awareness, the collaborative use shared artifacts and repositories, spending time at the other site and human "bridges" that mediate between people and cultures. Our findings suggest that organizational culture is permanently re-negotiated and adjusted to fit the distributed collaboration, as the teams learn how to deal with each other. Socialization plays a significant role in this learning process, and people are more likely to draw on national stereotypes when breakdowns occur. The influences of national culture and site-specific organizational culture are subtle and not easy to separate from other factors. Based on our experience, we argue that in order to achieve an accurate understanding of knowledge sharing practices in globally distributed software teams, these need to be studied in context, longitudinally, and from both onshore and offshore perspective.

Over the last decades outsourcing has established itself as widely accepted management practice. Information systems researchers have spent considerable effort in studying the outsourcing phenomenon and theorizing about it. Through the interaction between research and practice, as well as through own experiences, industry managers underwent a noticeable learning curve. This poses the question: is research still up to date or do we need to think about the next stage, a form of next generation outsourcing?

The growing offshoring process is the result of the fragmentation of production processes and the creation of global supply chains. This process has increased final and intermediate imports, but also the distance that goods travel in different stages until they reach the final consumer, as well as the requirements of transport per unit of output and the volume of CO 2 emissions generated in transporting them. Nowadays, there is no generally accepted criterion for international transport pollution allocation. No single country has the responsibility for emissions of international bunkers provided by IPCC. In this paper we propose a new methodology for quantifying by sector the impact of international freight transport on total pollution and assigning responsibility to consumers. This methodology considers the distance and the means of transport as key elements and uses inputoutput methodology. We apply this to the Spanish economy combining data from input-output tables, import data, and CO 2 emission data. The results show that the proportion of total CO 2 emissions accounted for by emissions from international freight transportation, allocated via the consumer criterion, increase up to 4.16% between 1995 and 2000. As expected, the industries where this offshoring process is more intense show the greatest increases in carbon emissions related to international transport. These emissions are significantly higher than emissions embodied in domestic inputs in some of those industries where international fragmentation of production is relevant and increasing.

The offshoring is nowadays one of main competitive strategies used by companies from different industries. Therefore rising markets  are  becoming  more  and  more  attractive  locations  for  enterprises  from  the  BPO/SSC  sector.  The  purpose  of  this article is to review the basic definitions of offshoring, and to present an analysis of this fast-growing area in Poland -the BPO / SSC sector. In the paper the following points were discussed among others: the number of companies and employees in this sector. The main location factors for foreign  industries in this sector in Poland were presented and analyzed.  These factors affect bringing in new investments and keeping the existing companies. In the long term they influence the development of the city, region and country.

A simple model of offshoring is used to integrate the complex gallery of results that exist in the theoretical offshoring/fragmentation literature. The paper depicts offshoring as 'shadow migration' and shows that this allows straightforward derivation of the general equilibrium effects on prices, wages, production and trade (necessary and sufficient conditions are provided). We show that offshoring requires modification of the four HO theorems, so econometricians who ignore offshoring might reject the HO theorem when a properly specified version held in the data. We also show that offshoring is an independent source of comparative advantage and can lead to intra-industry trade in a Walrasian setting. JEL: F02, F12, L22, R11

Due to the expanding trend to globalise software development organisations need to understand and address issues which previously did not arise. Cultural distance has been identified as one of these key issues. This paper presents the results from a three year study which identified the implications of misunderstanding and not addressing cultural differences. This work was undertaken within a multinational organisation which offshored part of their software development process from Ireland to Malaysia. Of particular relevance was where cultural difference was initially perceived as something which could be leveraged. The opposite proved to be the case and resulted in key Malaysian personnel being forced to leave the organisation. This was due to their cultural aversion to decline requests to undertake additional work. This resulted in serious implications for the success of the projects concerned. Ultimately the requirement for cultural training was recognized by the management and staff at both locations.

The seemingly unlimited availability of science and engineering (S&E) talent in emerging economies and the increasing difficulties of finding such talent in advanced economies have given rise to a new trend: the global sourcing of S&E talent. This paper examines the antecedents and dynamics of this trend. In particular, it examines the coevolution of macroeconomic forces, domestic and offshore national policies, industry dynamics, and firm-level offshoring capabilities driving today's offshoring decisions. The analysis exploits findings from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN) project. By taking a dynamic and multilevel perspective on next-generation offshoring, this paper may inform both firm-level strategies and national policy-making.

The evidence on growing inequality in OECD countries has raised an important debate over its main drivers, pointing out an increasing importance of capital-labour conflict. In this contribution, we aim at disentangling the role of some of the forces shaping this process. Our identification strategy relies on the sequential nature of wage setting and profits realization, in line with theoretical insights from the range theory of wages (postulating rents sharing at the shop floor level) and the principle of effective demand. In particular we focus on the role of technology and offshoring as instruments to create surplus and to shape the bargaining power of the parties involved in wage setting, and on different sources of demand as heterogeneous determinants of profits realization. The empirical analysis is performed on a panel of 38 manufacturing and service sectors over four time periods from 1995 to 2010, covering Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom. The contrasting effects of R&D and offshoring emerge as determinants of wages. Investment and internal demands are key variables in the realization of profits. When we look at the heterogeneity of the effects we see three main stylized facts. First of all, distinguishing for technological domain using Pavitt classes we can see that rents are effectively related with upgraded industries. Secondly, when we distinguish for the degree of openness we can see that, again, rents are mainly shared in open industries. Finally, when we disentangle the effect on wages per skill level, it is possible to confirm the intuition that offshoring hits the medium-low skill categories.

Details 74 projects - 11 Buyouts, 20 terminations and 43 with major problems, plus many bailouts. 28% of PFI/PPP contracts by capital value have been to subject to buyout, termination or major problems. The public cost of buyouts, bailouts, terminations and major problem contracts is £27,902m, when combined with the additional cost of private finance, interest rate swaps and higher PFI transaction costs.

Economists and other social scientists are calling for a reassessment of the impact of international trade on labor markets in developed and developing countries. Classical models of globalization and trade, based upon the international exchange of finished goods, fail to capture the fragmentation of much commodity production and the geographical separation of individual production tasks. This fragmentation, captured in the growing volume of intra-industry trade, prompts investigation of the effects of trade within, rather than between, sectors of the economy. In this paper we examine the relationship between international trade and the task structure of U.S. employment. We link disaggregate U.S. trade data from 1972 to 2006, the NBER manufacturing database, the Decennial Census , and occupational and task data from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Within-industry shifts in task characteristics are linked to import competition and technological change. Our results suggest that trade has played a major role in the growth in relative demand for nonroutine tasks, particularly those requiring high levels of interpersonal interaction.

This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy-opensourcing, as we term it here-whereby commercial companies and open source communities collaborate on development of software of commercial interest to the company. Building on previous research on information systems outsourcing, a theoretical framework for exploring the opensourcing phenomenon is derived. The first phase of the research concerned qualitative case studies in-1 that had "liberated" what had hitherto been proprietary software and sought to grow a global open source community around their product. We followed this with a large-scale survey involving additional exemplars of the phenomenon. The study identifies a number of symmetrical and complementary customer and community obligations that are associated with opensourcing success. We also identify a number of tension points on which customer and community perceptions tend to vary. Overall the key watchwords for opensourcing are openness, trust, tact, professionalism, transparency, and complementariness: The customer and community need to establish a trusted partnership of shared responsibility in building an overall opensourcing ecosystem. The study reveals an ongoing shift from OSS as a community of individual developers to OSS as a community of commercial organizations, primarily small to medium-sized enterprises. It also reveals that opensourcing provides ample opportunity for companies to headhunt top developers, hence moving from outsourcing to a largely unknown OSS workforce toward recruitment of developers from a global open source community whose talents have become known as a result of the opensourcing experience.

After observing the growth of the Indian and Filipino Business Processing Outsourcing sectors, Kenyan policy-makers and managers made substantial investments in international internet infrastructure and BPO marketing campaigns. While observers continue to discuss the sector in terms of its international work opportunities, in recent years the sector has increasingly focused on contracts sourced from Kenyan and other East African clients. The government has also refocused efforts on attracting international BPO companies. This domestic turn signals both the difficulties of gaining access to overseas work due to the power of incumbents and the increasing use of the internet and ICT-enabled automation within Kenyan organizations. In effect, better connectivity has enabled a two-way globalisation of services: Kenyan BPO companies have been able to access some international work opportunities but the connectivity has also contributed to the inflow of international service companies and business practices into Kenya. The conclusion examines what these shifts might entail for the sector and its workers in future.

This paper reviews a growing literature investigating how 'immigrant' diversity relates to urban economic performance. As distinct from the labor-supply focus of much of the economics of immigration, this paper reviews work that examines how growing heterogeneity in the composition of the workforce may beneficially or harmfully affect the production of goods, services and ideas, especially in regional economies. Taking stock of existing research, the paper argues that the low-hanging fruit in this field has now been picked, and lays out a set of open issues that need to be taken up in future studies in order to fulfill the promise of this work.

In an increasingly competitive business environment characterized by more globalization, deregulation and technological advances, companies have been looking for ways of differentiating their products and services and also rethinking their business model through leaner operations and reduced costs. In this context, a new practice that has recently gained a lot of attention is the offshore outsourcing of information technology (IT) activities and services. It has become an increasingly attractive proposition to co mpanies and organizations in industrialized countries. The most often cited benefit of such a practice is its cost-effectiveness; i.e., the ability of having business tasks or processes performed in an offshore country (most often in India) at an equal quality but significantly reduced cost than doing them at home. This paper presents the benefits and concerns in IT offshore outsourcing and discusses the sustainability of the comparative advantage that India has as the leading offshoring destination in the world. It argues that the currently low wages of skilled IT staff in India may be eroding over time and companies will be shifting their attention to other value-adding benefits as opposed to looking in offshoring countries for just lower cost provision of IT tasks and services.

The objective of this study is to explore factors that affect employee engagement in financial offshore organizations in India. Sixty employees involved in offshoring financial services were interviewed. Thematic analysis was used to analyze data collected in the study. Three main themes were identified: (1) implicit benefits, (2) organizational culture and (3) organizational policies. The findings of this study are important due to their practical implications. First, the factors will encourage employers to make more employee friendly policies, and second, by resolving the employee issues raised in this paper, it is anticipated that the employers will be able to enhance the overall efficiency of their workforce and improve the employer-employee relationship. Keywords: Employee Engagement, Financial Services, Offshoring, Organizational Culture, Thematic AnalysisCompanies in India are increasingly devising new ways and means to optimally utilize their workforce. However, only eight p...

Given the complexity of sourcing choices in R&D, driven by conflicting points of difference, scholars have struggled to formulate clear theoretical predictions about which sourcing choices lead to superior performance. Our study contributes to the elucidation of this question by studying both the antecedents and performance consequences (project cost and duration) of alternative sourcing choices in the context of new product development, thus bridging two rarely intersecting streams of research to discover unique insights. We draw from the transaction cost economics (TCE) and organizational learning theory to account for the interdependence of cost- and non-cost related factors in firms’ sourcing choices. Results from our empirical analysis, using data on clinical trials in the global biopharmaceutical industry, show that greater project complexity, project stage uncertainty, and prior sourcing experience determine the sourcing choices a firm makes. We also establish that alternative sourcing choices vary in their ability to minimize project cost versus project duration, and show that prior experience with a sourcing choice is an important moderator of project performance, in addition to being one of the determinants of sourcing choice.

n investigation of ownership and scale of offshoring of 'Non-Profit Distributing' and 'Hub' private finance infrastructure projects in Scotland. Identifies public sector pension fund investment in these projects and makes a series of recommendations.